It was so much easier to just stay on the plane, but she couldn't. She had to move off of the 777 or whatever giant flying cargo vehicle she'd just flown in on, be herded off like everyone. She had to make sure her paperwork was ready before she toed the line on the floor that marked thirty minutes to the official behind the plexi-glass half-shield that protected the biometric equipment from foreign sneezing. Or domestic sneezing, for that matter. The Homeland Security officials didn't discriminate, favoring one type of person's sneezes over another's. That would be rude.
So she took her little customs card, the one that asked you to really and truly declare the vegetables that you had brought in your overhead luggage from the homeland. Or the explosives or flammable materials, or the large amounts of money in any currency. She knew her passport information by heart, and she had nothing remotely flammable in her carry-on, though she had thought of setting her eight pair of panties on fire just to purge their collective funk from the suitcase. She'd taken to washing those in the bathroom sinks during every flight, one or two at a time. She used the soap available in the hand-pump dispenser, and if she was lucky she'd been bumped up to Club class and the soap was lavender-and-verbena scented. That helped with the funk, but didn't really eradicate it. It had been seven weeks since she'd been anywhere like a laundrette...Anyway: not flammable, no produce of any kind, no wads of cash. Dingy panties, passport and traveller's checks, rain parka, dancing shoes, many t-shirts that gained or lost relevance depending on which side of an ocean she'd just landed on, jeans that may or may not be kind to her starch-blitzed middle (it had been five weeks since she'd worn anything other than one of her two pairs of sweatpants.) Light colored hoodie. She'd bought that after she noticed that Security officers took aside and frisked a disproportionate amount of people in dark hoodies, and looked at hoodie-wearing as some sort of international gang sign. The men and women on duty would frown at you with their mouths or brows if you wore a hoodie, but she couldn 't give up the fleecy, embracing comfort yet, so she wore her light-yellow long-sleeved security blanket and had her story ready when she came to any kind of checkpoint.
The story was key to getting done what she needed to do, and she had practiced it in a terminal mirror before every re-telling for the first week of her travels. It had slowed her, and she had missed flights and had had to wait whole hours (once even a day, spent sleeping on benches as if she were just delayed, as if she were a retiree going to Greece or Florida or something,) but it had it's purpose. She knew the story by heart, or by soul, really: it reflected more her soul that her heart, she felt, if the listener were willing to peer deeper into the narrative. They weren't, generally. It was often enough just to tell the story and watch the official person glaze over with irritation, since that meant she had a very good chance of getting through because the official person didn't want to be bothered. She was the buck that was passed, and it had insulted her for a while, stung her un-sought-out soul. She learned not to resent the reason she was passed through the gates or doors or turnstiles or x-ray chambers. There would be a sympathetic ear somewhere in this next jaunt to Heathrow Airport. She was in Atlanta, in the States, and she had to (wanted to) turn right around and get the 8:10 am to Heathrow- it would be a swing, a high-stakes, adrenalized amble through the airport to get to the employee lounge computer to book her standby and then to the gate before last call, but she had the rubber-soled footwear for the job and she's never twisted an ankle in her life. Plus she had the story.
She made it to the front of the line, and was waved on to a booth with a semi-mild, semi-young man in it who looked neutrally at her passport and didn't grill her about leaving her suitcase unattended. She held her breath a bit, and let it out slowly. She had to time when to begin her sonnet- everyone was different, everyone's sense of the beginning of things was so varied that this was the hardest part of her mission, making sure she didn't step on someone's line or crush the silence rather than breaking it gently like an egg. She breathed. She waited for it, waited for it- he looked hard at his screen, he was reading the notes in her profile, and she had to allow him that and yet not allow him to come to a judgement about what he found out- she waited for it- he glanced up. She began:
"I know, it's a lot of stuff in there, right? It looks bad. I think it looks bad, does it look bad? I'm not sure what you guys are looking for, I just get on the planes because- well, it's there, it's in there, right?" She paused, moving her face into a rigor of openness.
"It looks..." the official began, but stopped. She counted to three.
"I have those conditions, and the medication for both of them is controlled, so I can't just walk into a-" she paused to think about which country and which city she was in, remembering the name of their most virulent drug store- "Rite-Aid and have them call my doctor. Who's in England. So..." she sighed with fatigue, not faked. "So getting it means I have to go back, more than I want to, I just want to stay and finish what I need to do. There's a memorial service, and..." She let it trial off, looked at him with dry and sleepy eyes.
"What are you doing in Georgia? What business brings you here? I see by this you're usually coming to O'Hare. Chicago's in a much different area of the country." He snorted just a little after he said it, conveying his mild disgust for the Midwest.
"I know! There's so much business that I had to do there-" This was true, there was business. There were meeting with lawyers and alienated family members and actual services to attend or attend to in the Midwest. There was grief, of course. There was sobbing that would have to happen when she attended to said business. She touched down in O'Hare International Airport over and over but she never, ever put her mind or her hands to the business. "I end up getting there but I have to go back, I did that about three times, I swear it was-"
The official looked at her instead of the screen, held that look. "It was eight."
She gasped and covered her mouth with her hand. The thing that made everything work was the story, and the thing that made the story believable was the telling of it: the details got more elaborate with every disembarking, and they surprised her as much as they informed them, and her reactions stayed true and consistent. She'd gasped because she was really shocked, because she didn't realize it was eight times. "God I have to stop" came out of her mouth before she could school it, but it was behind her hand so she thought he hadn't heard. "Anyway, I now have to go back again! There's an 8:10 flight back to Heathrow, can you believe it? But I have to get my daughter and bring her with me for the thing. The service. God."
"I don't know about- well, you can see how someone might think you're taking something back or bringing something here that we said we didn't want here? Like drugs-" he was making the speech, but she interrupted.
"I wrote it out on my form there! The only drugs I have are the ones I told you about, my prescriptions. I have to have an injection of one of them soon, actually. I'm coming up on my scheduled injection." She had no such medication, though it was true that if she didn't take her scheduled dose of Pregabalin soon she would feel really bad in about an hour. She would ache everywhere and she would have an even harder time napping on the plane to Heathrow if she didn't get that dose; she'd said it was an injection because everyone knew what a diabetic seizure looked like, and so far every official she'd encountered that dilly-dallied with her passage stood aside when she brought up the specter of a hypodermic needle. She wasn't diabetic but she never said she was. It was mutually beneficial for them to jump to the conclusion, but for some reason this semi-mild, semi-old fellow didn't flinch.
"Security worries about more than drugs, thank you. You could be trafficking jihadist literature or something like that. You could have been hired to transport illegal machine parts." He was clearly impovizing.
"You're joking. You must have seen some weird contraband, right? Machine parts!" She chuckled. She was certain she could get him on her side, give him the emotional equivalent of a pint with a mate right there at the kiosk.
"You wouldn't beleive it. There's machine parts that are contraband, on my honour." (He took a moment to look at her face, and did she notice a twinkle in his face? Was there a klatch, was there a camraderie that had just started?) "So, technically- you could have machine parts. Illegal machine parts from Russian tanks or some rot. Old laws."(...there was!)
She put her best sheltered housewife expression forward, and cry-whispered "What on Earth do people need those for??" as earnestly as the semi-hush in the security lines allowed. The man smiled, breaking his face into fully-mild, and did the stamping and the finger-pressing and even offered her some of his hand sanitizer when he was done. She'd introduced herself and learned his name was Colin as he was rolling the tip of her thumb on the clean biometric thumb reader. She told him her name, and she told him a little bit of the story she told them all.
"I have to go to a memorial service for my aunt, my great-aunt- and she was like a mother to me. Cancer got her. It got my uncle too, I hope the God they are up there eating a bunch of my Mom's strawberry-rhubarb cobbler right now, looking down. And I have these conditions-"
Colin, listening, looked at his screen again and asked her to wipe her hands on a new baby wipe, which he supplied. When it was done he said "My uncle too. Cancer." He flicked his eyes away from his readout and up to her for a second.
"Don't you hate it like, like the worst you could hate anything? But I have two medical conditions and they make me hurt- they are basically just nothing but pain." The woman was well into the details that she could never forget and so kept her voice casual. She noticed that using a casual voice during this part was what impressed; she'd learned to appear even-keeled while she yammered to strangers the strange circumstances of her mystery illnesses. For some reason they always believed her, and to her mind the facts that she hurt all the time and couldn't sleep for no good reason and might be losing her eyesight and was definitely losing her teeth were the parts that sounded most like bullshit. Colin responded with sympathy and hurried her through, getting out from behind his kiosk to walk her to the next desk, even. She thanked him with urgency. She almost cried with relief and full-body gratitude, saying "Bless you" probably a few more times than was prudent, but she was babbling. She'd have to watch that for when she got to Heathrow: too much was a tip-off, even if what was in overabundance was humility. People didn't trust it.
She got to the employee lounge. She got to the gate. She waited, possibly-misfit eyes losing focus so that she had to close them and listen for her name, which she didn't like to do (she wanted all her senses, as we all do.) She was called- she got on the plane, and her seat assignment was in a low number, so that she was in Club class and she had two loungers to herself since there had been no pair of people willing to pay for the un-separated honeymoon seats in the dead center of the Club section. She sent up a prayer, a beg of good Karma for the security sentinel Colin. She tore open the plastic film that covered the softer-than-Economy-Plus quilted blanket she was offered, even though as a friend of an employee she should smilingly refuse it. But she was a grieved woman and she was sure she could explain that to the flight attendant who had looked at her askew at some point during the flight. It was a long trip. It took over eight hours.
Sunday, June 29, 2014
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
Gathering Her Around Me
There is a staggering amount of things here. Her apartment- my apartment, for now, logically if not literally- is full of things that she liked and stuff she used and stuff she didn't use, crammed into the apartment's closets. Mom and Dad spent years driving a motor home all over America and into Mexico. They knew how to keep things simple, only minimally cluttered and in tiny amounts because of the lack of household surfaces. But here: her apartment, the one she bought after she lost Dad, is full, and we'll have the regular amount of purging to do before we can sell it. It keeps surprising me.
I keep thinking about comforting. Everyone wants to help me and my sister: there's pie and unasked-for prayers and offers of company. If I accept one of these, I'm afraid I'm doing it more for the sweet person offering it than for myself- it's a bit painful to think of these sincere well-wishers being left holding a rejected offering. Sometimes I want something and sometimes I don't. Ninety-five percent of the time when I do, I feel comforted.
There's one thing that bothers me: the offer of fantasy. People have said- via the usual social media channels- that she's an angel or in Heaven or that it's ok because she's with Dad, her husband, her best friend for 44 years. That last one...slays me. To think of her with her husband, together and (why not) young and healthy again, looking at each other with laughing fondness as in many of the pictures we have of them together before we were born and they got busy. My sister and I grew up with them looking at each other like that, so we know that was the tenor of their relationship even if there aren't as many like pictures from the family years. It...kills me, to think it, because I don't know for certain that's what is happening.
We tell each other those stories to comfort ourselves, of course, not because we have any real knowledge; yet I keep wanting to ask anyone who provides that particular vision for proof. There must be proof, I want there to be proof! The thought of them together at last and happy as they were and unconcerned because they either understand everything now or because they don't care, they did a good job in life, a good job as parents and they're done...is so lovely and so weighty that it feels dangerous to me. I'll believe it when there is some proof, and I'll give forty gold pieces to anyone who can find it for me.
The need for some real, almost-tangible foundation for that belief is a legacy of Mom's, ha ha ha! She was a rational woman and didn't stand for much of that spirit-talk in her lifetime. She was a Quaker, semi-devout, doing good deeds and joining committees when asked, yet when we talked about God she always said she had no words: it was too big a concept, too unknowable to express. She confessed she had barely an idea that God was there, and she practiced listening every Sunday she could. So this skepticism is bred into me by the very woman who's death is the source of all this fantasy-talk about posthumous reunion. That small irony makes me smile, now, because I know that Mom would have laughed at it.
She raised me. I know what made her laugh. She was my mother for forty-six years, and there's my proof.
I keep thinking about comforting. Everyone wants to help me and my sister: there's pie and unasked-for prayers and offers of company. If I accept one of these, I'm afraid I'm doing it more for the sweet person offering it than for myself- it's a bit painful to think of these sincere well-wishers being left holding a rejected offering. Sometimes I want something and sometimes I don't. Ninety-five percent of the time when I do, I feel comforted.
There's one thing that bothers me: the offer of fantasy. People have said- via the usual social media channels- that she's an angel or in Heaven or that it's ok because she's with Dad, her husband, her best friend for 44 years. That last one...slays me. To think of her with her husband, together and (why not) young and healthy again, looking at each other with laughing fondness as in many of the pictures we have of them together before we were born and they got busy. My sister and I grew up with them looking at each other like that, so we know that was the tenor of their relationship even if there aren't as many like pictures from the family years. It...kills me, to think it, because I don't know for certain that's what is happening.
We tell each other those stories to comfort ourselves, of course, not because we have any real knowledge; yet I keep wanting to ask anyone who provides that particular vision for proof. There must be proof, I want there to be proof! The thought of them together at last and happy as they were and unconcerned because they either understand everything now or because they don't care, they did a good job in life, a good job as parents and they're done...is so lovely and so weighty that it feels dangerous to me. I'll believe it when there is some proof, and I'll give forty gold pieces to anyone who can find it for me.
The need for some real, almost-tangible foundation for that belief is a legacy of Mom's, ha ha ha! She was a rational woman and didn't stand for much of that spirit-talk in her lifetime. She was a Quaker, semi-devout, doing good deeds and joining committees when asked, yet when we talked about God she always said she had no words: it was too big a concept, too unknowable to express. She confessed she had barely an idea that God was there, and she practiced listening every Sunday she could. So this skepticism is bred into me by the very woman who's death is the source of all this fantasy-talk about posthumous reunion. That small irony makes me smile, now, because I know that Mom would have laughed at it.
She raised me. I know what made her laugh. She was my mother for forty-six years, and there's my proof.
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Hazeldene
There's a place up the road from where I am now- a beautiful land called Hazeldene. I'm assuming it's called Hazeldene because there's a cast iron plaque on the ancient-stone-and-masonry wall that holds the gates that allow you onto the property, and that that plaque is on the set of gates that appears to lead to the drive that takes you to the stables behind the Big House. To be honest I'm not sure it there's a Small House, but the one evident house is large enough to be referred to as the Big House all on its' own. It appears to have gigantism. To be more accurate, it appears to have been built expressly for people who are afflicted with gigantism- from the outside, it looks as if it has only two floors but that these floors were each made twenty feet high.
I keep walking by this thing on my way down to the local village. There's a busy county road that runs right next to the sidewalk outside the semi-ancient stone wall, and should you be willing to risk some light jaywalking (even though I moved from Brooklyn NY to Bumblefuck NJ when I was young, I lived in the city long enough to absorb the lesson that any jaywalking that ended without the need of a tourniquet is much closer in spirit to crossing with the school crossing guard, sissy) you can feast your eyes on the horsies that belong to the possibly humongous owners of Hazeldene. They are pretty, pretty ponies indeed, and their blankets for the winter months are much better than the best comforter in my own house. That's fair, given that I couldn't even recoup the traveling expenses of putting myself out to stud, much less the vet's bills, but still it's the principle of the thing. What thing? I have no idea, but I had to see for myself just what it was like inside this grand mansion of the Fens.
I made a whopping big casserole dish of my sister's crisp recipe to bring to Hazeldene, because I have yet to meet a person who can't be won over with the right amount of brown sugar. There are some apples here that are just wrong, too-close-to-an-industrial-accident kind of wrong, and with strange lumps that almost cry out for a session with a master phrenologist ("phren" from the Latin meaning "head-bump"; "-ologist" from the Greek meaning "gasbag.") They are lumpy and frightening and the size of medium cabbages, and they're perfect for a delightful crisp. Only you don't want to call it a crisp, because that says to the British listener that you've just made a delightful potato chip and they become confused when asked if they would like a share of it. One can see the British listener's imagination trying to figure out how they are going to receive some of the potato chip- on a plate? As crumbs, served with a tiny broom so that you can just sweep them into your mouth? One can usually see the British listener's polite refusal already well formed in their eyes before one remembers to call the crisp a crumble. Or at least I do, because I can be slow on the uptake.
So I set off for that glorious one-and-a-half acre estate, muttering "Crumble. Crumble. Apple Crumble" to myself and smiling broadly at anyone I saw walking along the way. I swiveled my head sharply to smile broadly at people if I had to (and I don't mind telling you that I got even broader smiles in return, and widened eyes that burned with something that probably wasn't fear!) I marched up to the massive front door- I'd been tempted to go around the side and look for the service entrance, but I'm An American, so I wouldn't even know what one looked like if I found it, like are the doors round like Hobbit-house doors- which reminded me that I should ask the person who answered something about Hobbits, because all British people love being compared with them, am I right?- but I marched up to that massive front door, and I rang the bell. I made sure to run right over to the window so that I could witness the butler or goblin or Edwardian ghost answer it. It was hard to stand in the elephantine shrubbery and stand on tiptoe and balance my crisp (sorry: crumble!) but I did it, for I was the intrepid explorer, dammit, and if there was genteel freakishness to be witnessed, I was going to witness it, all right.
She must have come up from the other side of the house or wing or flown to the door on her broomstick or something, because I didn't see the lady of the house open the door- I only became aware of someone making gentle retching noises to my left after a period of about three minutes. I looked: she was amazing, standing there in her regular clothes (jeans even!) as if she hadn't been left at the altar decades earlier and been waiting around for her fiance in her decaying wedding dress ever since. There wasn't even a bonnet, which was a disappointment, but I figured there must be more artifacts in the house. "May I help you?" said the Lady.
"Hey, hi, I'm Jennifer and I'm the American from up the road a ways- your house is really enormous. It's just as enormous as it can be on the outside!" I said the last bit with a Louisiana accent, just to drive home the point that I'm American and that makes me cool, because accents are cool. I knew I wasn't going to get closer to any of the inherent fun-ness of this actual British Lady without providing some weirdness of my own: Louisiana Bayou Talk would be my ticket inside! The Lady just stood there in her not-at-all creepy jeans, squinting lightly at me, smiling lightly too. I noticed that she was large but in a regular way. "Are you-all gonna invite me in or do I haf ta stand here lookin' pathetic until even the mosquitoes don't wanna take a sip of me?" I asked.
The Lady blinked a fair amount during the pause that followed. "...mosquitoes?" she said, and I waltzed past her into the foyer, because that was close enough to an invitation for me....the place was huge, but a huge you could get used to: the ceilings were really high, and must have been made that way during WWII so that the patriotic owner could hide a Spitfire attack plane in it, just in case the countryside needed a Spitfire to roar out of the second-story window during a German raid, scaring the pants off The Fuhrer and smashing all the windows and brickwork. "You had a Spitfire in here. Wow." I said, still looking up. "...Pardon?" the Lady asked. She was being coy, but I wasn't to be put off. I decided to be un-coy (in retrospect, it's been suggested that what I was being was Rude. I didn't care for the suggestion.) I looked for the giant marble staircase that led to the landing that would naturally have as much floor space as my dining room, to better afford the necessary gawping space for the ancient familial crest that would assuredly be in stained glass above it. There was no such window. I took the still damn big mahogany staircase upstairs, turning to hand over the dessert halfway up.
"This here is a crisp! It's just like a crumble, but it's real easy to say because there's only one syllable. Y'all got too many syllables over here, I'll say that. Darlin'." I said this to the Lady as she took the casserole dish. She surprised me by answering: "I concur." She sounded posh ("posh" is British for Real Fancy-Like.)
"See, now you coulda just said Yeah. Or Ayuh, if the New England thang would feel more comfortable comin' out of your mouth." I was having trouble keeping track of which accent was most effective on her...perspective? Mood? I wasn't sure, but I'd found what I was looking for: A bedroom. A wardrobe- no closet for the Lady, and it made me instantly sad to think of rich people not having a closet. Not even the rich people. In America, rich people had closets as big as a small stable. It was pitiful. The wardrobe did contain a fair amount of clothes that we could use (my very first job was as a costumer's assistant at a small, threadbare theater, and I learned that one can always find a way to make any kind of fabric into a costume: blazers and ballgowns may be desirable, but no piece of clothing could ever be more glorious than when it transforms into a sequined tunic for Mustardseed's only scene in A Midsummer Night's Dream.) I threw a long dress at the Lady, and tied a ribbon around her torso just beneath the bust.
"There. Now you're Eliza Bennett, before she's met her Darcy. Sorry- I mean y'all are Eliza Bennett." I said, and the Lady was smiling oh so gently now.
"That is a funny accent." she said.
"Thanks- yours is funny, too. It's real funny-like." I replied, and she giggled. "Here." The Lady pulled an aviator's helmet and goggles from the back of her wardrobe. A bit of snow fell out with it, and though my brain screamed with the need to burrow into the back of that wardrobe and bring back a satyr, I stopped myself. Next time. In the meanwhile, the Lady had beckoned me downstairs. We went back down the giant staircase and into the huge living room, and the Lady set up chairs, one right behind another.
"You can be the brash, inexperienced Yankee pilot, and I'll be the long-suffering British co-pilot." she said, and pulled up the dress around her knees as she sat down so that she had room for her invisible machine gun. I clapped my hands.
"You are fun! That's a relief- for a second I thought that you'd want to talk about gardening."
"Isn't it 'y'all are fun'?" she asked. There was mischief in her eyes. It was such a welcoming look that I forgot all about my disappointment at the lack of a house ghost.
"Yes ma'am, it sure is: y'all are real fun." I said, and sat down in the seat she's set for me, prepared to take down as many German planes as a fake Southerner and a Lady in Edwardian costuming could manage.
I keep walking by this thing on my way down to the local village. There's a busy county road that runs right next to the sidewalk outside the semi-ancient stone wall, and should you be willing to risk some light jaywalking (even though I moved from Brooklyn NY to Bumblefuck NJ when I was young, I lived in the city long enough to absorb the lesson that any jaywalking that ended without the need of a tourniquet is much closer in spirit to crossing with the school crossing guard, sissy) you can feast your eyes on the horsies that belong to the possibly humongous owners of Hazeldene. They are pretty, pretty ponies indeed, and their blankets for the winter months are much better than the best comforter in my own house. That's fair, given that I couldn't even recoup the traveling expenses of putting myself out to stud, much less the vet's bills, but still it's the principle of the thing. What thing? I have no idea, but I had to see for myself just what it was like inside this grand mansion of the Fens.
I made a whopping big casserole dish of my sister's crisp recipe to bring to Hazeldene, because I have yet to meet a person who can't be won over with the right amount of brown sugar. There are some apples here that are just wrong, too-close-to-an-industrial-accident kind of wrong, and with strange lumps that almost cry out for a session with a master phrenologist ("phren" from the Latin meaning "head-bump"; "-ologist" from the Greek meaning "gasbag.") They are lumpy and frightening and the size of medium cabbages, and they're perfect for a delightful crisp. Only you don't want to call it a crisp, because that says to the British listener that you've just made a delightful potato chip and they become confused when asked if they would like a share of it. One can see the British listener's imagination trying to figure out how they are going to receive some of the potato chip- on a plate? As crumbs, served with a tiny broom so that you can just sweep them into your mouth? One can usually see the British listener's polite refusal already well formed in their eyes before one remembers to call the crisp a crumble. Or at least I do, because I can be slow on the uptake.
So I set off for that glorious one-and-a-half acre estate, muttering "Crumble. Crumble. Apple Crumble" to myself and smiling broadly at anyone I saw walking along the way. I swiveled my head sharply to smile broadly at people if I had to (and I don't mind telling you that I got even broader smiles in return, and widened eyes that burned with something that probably wasn't fear!) I marched up to the massive front door- I'd been tempted to go around the side and look for the service entrance, but I'm An American, so I wouldn't even know what one looked like if I found it, like are the doors round like Hobbit-house doors- which reminded me that I should ask the person who answered something about Hobbits, because all British people love being compared with them, am I right?- but I marched up to that massive front door, and I rang the bell. I made sure to run right over to the window so that I could witness the butler or goblin or Edwardian ghost answer it. It was hard to stand in the elephantine shrubbery and stand on tiptoe and balance my crisp (sorry: crumble!) but I did it, for I was the intrepid explorer, dammit, and if there was genteel freakishness to be witnessed, I was going to witness it, all right.
She must have come up from the other side of the house or wing or flown to the door on her broomstick or something, because I didn't see the lady of the house open the door- I only became aware of someone making gentle retching noises to my left after a period of about three minutes. I looked: she was amazing, standing there in her regular clothes (jeans even!) as if she hadn't been left at the altar decades earlier and been waiting around for her fiance in her decaying wedding dress ever since. There wasn't even a bonnet, which was a disappointment, but I figured there must be more artifacts in the house. "May I help you?" said the Lady.
"Hey, hi, I'm Jennifer and I'm the American from up the road a ways- your house is really enormous. It's just as enormous as it can be on the outside!" I said the last bit with a Louisiana accent, just to drive home the point that I'm American and that makes me cool, because accents are cool. I knew I wasn't going to get closer to any of the inherent fun-ness of this actual British Lady without providing some weirdness of my own: Louisiana Bayou Talk would be my ticket inside! The Lady just stood there in her not-at-all creepy jeans, squinting lightly at me, smiling lightly too. I noticed that she was large but in a regular way. "Are you-all gonna invite me in or do I haf ta stand here lookin' pathetic until even the mosquitoes don't wanna take a sip of me?" I asked.
The Lady blinked a fair amount during the pause that followed. "...mosquitoes?" she said, and I waltzed past her into the foyer, because that was close enough to an invitation for me....the place was huge, but a huge you could get used to: the ceilings were really high, and must have been made that way during WWII so that the patriotic owner could hide a Spitfire attack plane in it, just in case the countryside needed a Spitfire to roar out of the second-story window during a German raid, scaring the pants off The Fuhrer and smashing all the windows and brickwork. "You had a Spitfire in here. Wow." I said, still looking up. "...Pardon?" the Lady asked. She was being coy, but I wasn't to be put off. I decided to be un-coy (in retrospect, it's been suggested that what I was being was Rude. I didn't care for the suggestion.) I looked for the giant marble staircase that led to the landing that would naturally have as much floor space as my dining room, to better afford the necessary gawping space for the ancient familial crest that would assuredly be in stained glass above it. There was no such window. I took the still damn big mahogany staircase upstairs, turning to hand over the dessert halfway up.
"This here is a crisp! It's just like a crumble, but it's real easy to say because there's only one syllable. Y'all got too many syllables over here, I'll say that. Darlin'." I said this to the Lady as she took the casserole dish. She surprised me by answering: "I concur." She sounded posh ("posh" is British for Real Fancy-Like.)
"See, now you coulda just said Yeah. Or Ayuh, if the New England thang would feel more comfortable comin' out of your mouth." I was having trouble keeping track of which accent was most effective on her...perspective? Mood? I wasn't sure, but I'd found what I was looking for: A bedroom. A wardrobe- no closet for the Lady, and it made me instantly sad to think of rich people not having a closet. Not even the rich people. In America, rich people had closets as big as a small stable. It was pitiful. The wardrobe did contain a fair amount of clothes that we could use (my very first job was as a costumer's assistant at a small, threadbare theater, and I learned that one can always find a way to make any kind of fabric into a costume: blazers and ballgowns may be desirable, but no piece of clothing could ever be more glorious than when it transforms into a sequined tunic for Mustardseed's only scene in A Midsummer Night's Dream.) I threw a long dress at the Lady, and tied a ribbon around her torso just beneath the bust.
"There. Now you're Eliza Bennett, before she's met her Darcy. Sorry- I mean y'all are Eliza Bennett." I said, and the Lady was smiling oh so gently now.
"That is a funny accent." she said.
"Thanks- yours is funny, too. It's real funny-like." I replied, and she giggled. "Here." The Lady pulled an aviator's helmet and goggles from the back of her wardrobe. A bit of snow fell out with it, and though my brain screamed with the need to burrow into the back of that wardrobe and bring back a satyr, I stopped myself. Next time. In the meanwhile, the Lady had beckoned me downstairs. We went back down the giant staircase and into the huge living room, and the Lady set up chairs, one right behind another.
"You can be the brash, inexperienced Yankee pilot, and I'll be the long-suffering British co-pilot." she said, and pulled up the dress around her knees as she sat down so that she had room for her invisible machine gun. I clapped my hands.
"You are fun! That's a relief- for a second I thought that you'd want to talk about gardening."
"Isn't it 'y'all are fun'?" she asked. There was mischief in her eyes. It was such a welcoming look that I forgot all about my disappointment at the lack of a house ghost.
"Yes ma'am, it sure is: y'all are real fun." I said, and sat down in the seat she's set for me, prepared to take down as many German planes as a fake Southerner and a Lady in Edwardian costuming could manage.
Monday, March 17, 2014
Curiosity
When I was home visiting a week ago I stayed at a loved one's house, and watched them suffer. There was a lot of time to think: there were treatments, and rides to treatments, and a doctor and many nurses and meals to cook and then ignore. There were pies and cookies and I had a birthday right in the middle of it. So I ate, and I cooked and all that shit, but there was suffering and going to bed. It leaves gaps of time that are perfect for some choice self-recrimination. And boredom. I kept thinking about how I, too, was suffering and then berating myself for many tedious afternoons, tasking myself for being a selfish shit (and I know you can relate: you're human, and you've probably been around/not been around someone whom you love who's having a really hard time, and you've felt like a selfish little shit for thinking about what their suffering means for your general level of satisfaction with things. If you haven't been to that particular road yet, disregard everything I just wrote- no need to get there any sooner than you're called.) I realized that the worst thing that could happen to me through my loved one's suffering is to get so bored that I just slide sideways into the despondency that's outside the rooms with the screens.
Fortunatley, there's television. The walls in the rooms that adjoin the abyss are covered in screens, but as long as you can find something on them that will hold your interest in an amused, possibly even charmed way, you can just stay in the rooms forever. That is the hope. The quality of your distraction has to be just right: intense about the right things (The Practice of Law! The Meaning of Familial Loyalty! Profiting Mightily from Property Re-sales!) but not too intense (lovers can always find other beds, for example.) There are eighty quidrillion choices out there, eighty quidrillion shows; I've seen maybe ten of them. The show that has me moderately curious right now is The Good Wife.
I think you know it. There's a bunch of good actors in it and a handful of mediocre ones (unfortunately, the lead role is occupied by one of the mediocre ones; she does a small amount of emotions well, but other than that, she's kind of blank. The fact that the pivotal performer is just meh is interesting, almost very interesting, to me: how did the producers know that I, in my sniveling angst, needed an untalented lead to bring me back to it, eternally curious about how the good cast members would dance around the bland one, holding my BFA in acting & directing crumpled into a metaphorical ball in my lap and willing the lead to wake the fuck up already...how did they know??) It's like a glass of warm milk, that show. It's so gently comforting that I'll watch three of them in a row when I might be doing all kinds of other things like working on some play or story or even a blog post. I could be out walking. I could be washing the walls before the wall inspector gets here or whatever it is that compels us to clean walls. Ditto mopping, or just taking care of myself and not getting up too many times to begin a task and then walk away from it for a moment, never to return. I could save myself some really sore hips (moving too much can put some extra funk in my Sacroiliac Joint Dysfunction.) But The Good Wife is my friend, and never judges. She does not act (at least, not well) and she does not judge. I can watch as many episodes as I want and I get to stay in a room next to the big pit of boredom-induced self-loathing. I'm not sure what's going to happen when I've watched every episode available on our Netflix account- I suppose I'll have to find another slightly involving television show to watch. Nothing crazy- I wouldn't be able to take Breaking Bad right now, and I don't have tiny brushes to scrub my eyeballs with after the most violent chapters of that show- but something that arouses a manageable amount of curiosity.
Any suggestions? It could be about anything. I just need a fall-back, now. I just need some unspooling fiction, something with lots of back story, something with a good cast and maybe one or two bad actors, for contrast. I'm petrified that I'm going to have to think hard about what it means that there's a person that I love who's suffering.
Fortunatley, there's television. The walls in the rooms that adjoin the abyss are covered in screens, but as long as you can find something on them that will hold your interest in an amused, possibly even charmed way, you can just stay in the rooms forever. That is the hope. The quality of your distraction has to be just right: intense about the right things (The Practice of Law! The Meaning of Familial Loyalty! Profiting Mightily from Property Re-sales!) but not too intense (lovers can always find other beds, for example.) There are eighty quidrillion choices out there, eighty quidrillion shows; I've seen maybe ten of them. The show that has me moderately curious right now is The Good Wife.
I think you know it. There's a bunch of good actors in it and a handful of mediocre ones (unfortunately, the lead role is occupied by one of the mediocre ones; she does a small amount of emotions well, but other than that, she's kind of blank. The fact that the pivotal performer is just meh is interesting, almost very interesting, to me: how did the producers know that I, in my sniveling angst, needed an untalented lead to bring me back to it, eternally curious about how the good cast members would dance around the bland one, holding my BFA in acting & directing crumpled into a metaphorical ball in my lap and willing the lead to wake the fuck up already...how did they know??) It's like a glass of warm milk, that show. It's so gently comforting that I'll watch three of them in a row when I might be doing all kinds of other things like working on some play or story or even a blog post. I could be out walking. I could be washing the walls before the wall inspector gets here or whatever it is that compels us to clean walls. Ditto mopping, or just taking care of myself and not getting up too many times to begin a task and then walk away from it for a moment, never to return. I could save myself some really sore hips (moving too much can put some extra funk in my Sacroiliac Joint Dysfunction.) But The Good Wife is my friend, and never judges. She does not act (at least, not well) and she does not judge. I can watch as many episodes as I want and I get to stay in a room next to the big pit of boredom-induced self-loathing. I'm not sure what's going to happen when I've watched every episode available on our Netflix account- I suppose I'll have to find another slightly involving television show to watch. Nothing crazy- I wouldn't be able to take Breaking Bad right now, and I don't have tiny brushes to scrub my eyeballs with after the most violent chapters of that show- but something that arouses a manageable amount of curiosity.
Any suggestions? It could be about anything. I just need a fall-back, now. I just need some unspooling fiction, something with lots of back story, something with a good cast and maybe one or two bad actors, for contrast. I'm petrified that I'm going to have to think hard about what it means that there's a person that I love who's suffering.
Friday, August 30, 2013
A Tricky Place In Which to Dwell
Yea to the National Health Service for their contributions to my well-being! It's working!
England is very concerned about my well-being, though I don't take it personally: they're concerned about everyone's well-being. There are signs- good, strong signs made of something durable and impervious to damp- regarding how many vegetables you eat, and what you should do if you're bullied, and the fact that your food is sourced from a few counties away (I know, it's parishes, not counties. I prefer to think of them as Shires, since everything here is within a Shire- just go ahead and picture the Hobbitses, it's easier than trying to put the Democratic Theology or Theocratic Democracy {plus bonus Royal Persons}in the same bed together.) The UK cares so much about its' subjects' well-being that it uses the word "sourced" in the signs and banners and spots that remind you to feel good about your food, rather than potentially insult your intelligence by using the phrase "comes from." I feel content with my lot in a way that I never did in the US- though that might be the drugs talking.
I'm pretty sure it's the drugs talking. I'd prefer it to be the beer talking, but I don't regularly drink becuase I'm taking drugs for my Chronic Pain Condition, which is from a nail put in my head when I was bullied in High School that's just slowly worked itself into my cranuim, past my Prefrontal Cortex and into the Medulla Oblongata, or "Middle," where it consistently pokes into the area of my brain where I think about High School. That, in a nutshell, is the essence of the pathological chronic pain- your brain refuses to stop thinking about the pain. When I got over here I swore (standing in my first-every backyard, looking at the fence around it. There wasn't a sunset or a raw potato and I wasn't even wearing a Civil War Era dress, but I swore nonetheless,) that I would change medications and I would do so with an eye toward ultimately taking less of them. And I have! I switched one of my anti-depressants for another one!...and I realize that this doesn't sound like progress. It is, it is; it's such dreamy, half-satisfied progress that everything seems livelier, less effortful, and zippy. I dropped another one althogether. I'm so sort of blissed out by the fact that I've done it- I moved here from the US without anyone losing their eyesight from random stress-reflex flailing while I was packing some knives, without sending off four or five copies of any divorce papers to my already-moved spouse, just to make sure he got the point; without losing any teeth from either lack of vitamin C or from just giving up and falling face-forward onto the concrete sidewalk, mouth first. It's hard to sort out which is the greater source of happiness: my survival or my chemical intake. I'm pretty sure it's the chemical intake that's dictating I not worry about it.
I miss people. There: that's the thing, the one thing, that makes my gently muddled mind become uncertain of the justification that I should not worry and also be happy. There are people I miss, and I miss them less than I should. Pills, or just me? Am I completely enslaved by the lovely Seratonin and Melatonin and many other similarly named hormones, and am I then less sympatheric to my beloved's voices and trials and failed attempts than I one was? I though myself a lout many times before, before I came here and met my little navy-blue-and-white encapsulated buddies, for not being a good friend. Self-flagellation about how much less effort you put into your relationships in comparison to, say, Charlotte on Sex in the City is a given for those of us who just cannot put in that much effort. No matter how hard it is to button your shirt and no matter how many extra minutes it takes us to brush our sensitive teeth and touchy gums, those of us who contend with some extra Substance P (which, by the by, is a neurotransmitter that is located in the spinal fluid whose sole joy it is to transmit pain signals to the brain. People with FM have more of it, generally, but the fascinating thing about that to me is that it's named Substance P. Whomever it was that discovered it must have had a busy day, and by the time they got to the naming bit they must have looked at their array of tubes and disposable safety goggles and little puddles of spinal fluid on the laboratory floor that were still left to clean up, and said to their impatient PhD candidate intern, all ready with the pen and official naming paperwork: "You know, it's late; let's just write down...uh...Substance P. Yeah. There's the P for Pain, so that's good enough- the judges at the Nobel Institute don't need a fancy name anyway, right? The important thing is the quality of the work. Now here's the mop,")...those of us who have to contend with perhaps three times more Substance P (also could be the name of a seventies-era laboratory-based street drug) must feel guilt about it. Sorry, but we have to. It's as requisite as acquiring full-time under-eye baggies from the ongoing lack of sleep that usually comes with hurting all the time. And since I miss people, since I'm now really really far away from them, I feel like I should be really whipping myself for not rallying and swooping into a letter-writing frenzy, complete with country cute stickers that I got at the carbon-neutral Tesco in our next town over and sketches of the house in colored pencil...but I'm not. I feel OK.
I miss people, but not enough. It's the drugs, unless it's not. The tricky part is deciding which of those things is me and which of those things is induced. The not-tricky part, I guess, is conducting my day as I always have and just getting through it, one distraction at a time, one hour-long rest at a time. I apologize, my friends; I might feel differently but it seems that won't make much difference in the amount of chi I can expend. The thing that has become clearer, so clear it's like a beautiful hand-blown glass: the ones who stick with me, who have stuck with me, through my plodding communications over the years are very good people to be friends with. We chronics are lucky that way.
England is very concerned about my well-being, though I don't take it personally: they're concerned about everyone's well-being. There are signs- good, strong signs made of something durable and impervious to damp- regarding how many vegetables you eat, and what you should do if you're bullied, and the fact that your food is sourced from a few counties away (I know, it's parishes, not counties. I prefer to think of them as Shires, since everything here is within a Shire- just go ahead and picture the Hobbitses, it's easier than trying to put the Democratic Theology or Theocratic Democracy {plus bonus Royal Persons}in the same bed together.) The UK cares so much about its' subjects' well-being that it uses the word "sourced" in the signs and banners and spots that remind you to feel good about your food, rather than potentially insult your intelligence by using the phrase "comes from." I feel content with my lot in a way that I never did in the US- though that might be the drugs talking.
I'm pretty sure it's the drugs talking. I'd prefer it to be the beer talking, but I don't regularly drink becuase I'm taking drugs for my Chronic Pain Condition, which is from a nail put in my head when I was bullied in High School that's just slowly worked itself into my cranuim, past my Prefrontal Cortex and into the Medulla Oblongata, or "Middle," where it consistently pokes into the area of my brain where I think about High School. That, in a nutshell, is the essence of the pathological chronic pain- your brain refuses to stop thinking about the pain. When I got over here I swore (standing in my first-every backyard, looking at the fence around it. There wasn't a sunset or a raw potato and I wasn't even wearing a Civil War Era dress, but I swore nonetheless,) that I would change medications and I would do so with an eye toward ultimately taking less of them. And I have! I switched one of my anti-depressants for another one!...and I realize that this doesn't sound like progress. It is, it is; it's such dreamy, half-satisfied progress that everything seems livelier, less effortful, and zippy. I dropped another one althogether. I'm so sort of blissed out by the fact that I've done it- I moved here from the US without anyone losing their eyesight from random stress-reflex flailing while I was packing some knives, without sending off four or five copies of any divorce papers to my already-moved spouse, just to make sure he got the point; without losing any teeth from either lack of vitamin C or from just giving up and falling face-forward onto the concrete sidewalk, mouth first. It's hard to sort out which is the greater source of happiness: my survival or my chemical intake. I'm pretty sure it's the chemical intake that's dictating I not worry about it.
I miss people. There: that's the thing, the one thing, that makes my gently muddled mind become uncertain of the justification that I should not worry and also be happy. There are people I miss, and I miss them less than I should. Pills, or just me? Am I completely enslaved by the lovely Seratonin and Melatonin and many other similarly named hormones, and am I then less sympatheric to my beloved's voices and trials and failed attempts than I one was? I though myself a lout many times before, before I came here and met my little navy-blue-and-white encapsulated buddies, for not being a good friend. Self-flagellation about how much less effort you put into your relationships in comparison to, say, Charlotte on Sex in the City is a given for those of us who just cannot put in that much effort. No matter how hard it is to button your shirt and no matter how many extra minutes it takes us to brush our sensitive teeth and touchy gums, those of us who contend with some extra Substance P (which, by the by, is a neurotransmitter that is located in the spinal fluid whose sole joy it is to transmit pain signals to the brain. People with FM have more of it, generally, but the fascinating thing about that to me is that it's named Substance P. Whomever it was that discovered it must have had a busy day, and by the time they got to the naming bit they must have looked at their array of tubes and disposable safety goggles and little puddles of spinal fluid on the laboratory floor that were still left to clean up, and said to their impatient PhD candidate intern, all ready with the pen and official naming paperwork: "You know, it's late; let's just write down...uh...Substance P. Yeah. There's the P for Pain, so that's good enough- the judges at the Nobel Institute don't need a fancy name anyway, right? The important thing is the quality of the work. Now here's the mop,")...those of us who have to contend with perhaps three times more Substance P (also could be the name of a seventies-era laboratory-based street drug) must feel guilt about it. Sorry, but we have to. It's as requisite as acquiring full-time under-eye baggies from the ongoing lack of sleep that usually comes with hurting all the time. And since I miss people, since I'm now really really far away from them, I feel like I should be really whipping myself for not rallying and swooping into a letter-writing frenzy, complete with country cute stickers that I got at the carbon-neutral Tesco in our next town over and sketches of the house in colored pencil...but I'm not. I feel OK.
I miss people, but not enough. It's the drugs, unless it's not. The tricky part is deciding which of those things is me and which of those things is induced. The not-tricky part, I guess, is conducting my day as I always have and just getting through it, one distraction at a time, one hour-long rest at a time. I apologize, my friends; I might feel differently but it seems that won't make much difference in the amount of chi I can expend. The thing that has become clearer, so clear it's like a beautiful hand-blown glass: the ones who stick with me, who have stuck with me, through my plodding communications over the years are very good people to be friends with. We chronics are lucky that way.
Sunday, August 4, 2013
Decisions, Simplified
Yesterday the cat got out of the house. She snuck off, quiet-like, and dropped the story-and-a-half down to the ground so she could see what all the fuss was about. We'd been leaving the house and then coming back and then leaving again for as long as she could remember, and in between these machinations she'd bounce a ball on the wall and wait for it to bounce back, counting the days she'd been cooped up. Naturally the dog would have to chase it and there would be some perfunctory hissing and then he'd give it back and she'd toss it at the wall, counting. She would not have lost her place because she's a cat.
The best part about losing your cat is that everything snaps into action: your vision clears so that you can see the hawks circling, your ears pick up much more sound, including any high-pitched skreeeeeee from the neighbor's mower that could be mistaken for a cat provided said cat were being mangled, your breathing swells to accompany the panic-y thought of finding the animal and the ensuing attempt to pick it up. All this because your eleven-year-old's face is making a frown that will not turn upside-down no matter how many times you jokingly order it to do so. All the regular shit (and the irregular shit when you come right down to it) disappears like lightning and you can see what you have to do: tape flyers on everything. Yeah. Tape Flyers on Everything. You've been waiting. It's such parenting legend, such a milestone, that you can easily bring yourself to near-tears imagining how fucked up your kid is going to be if they don't lose their cat: how will they cope? Where will they learn the valuable life-lesson and current #3 Parenting Buzzword resiliency if they don't lose their/the family's pet? Will your child grow up not knowing the value of Taping Flyers to Everything? My God: what if your genius child goes to college not knowing- what if they start a band?? It'll be too late! No one's gonna teach them now! They'll end up practicing in your conservatory every night until 9:30 and insist that for their birthday you continue their guitar lessons forever!!
I'm a big fan of anything that will keep me motivated right now. I'm switching medications. The old ones were being rude to me by demanding my liver and kidneys and skin flush them out but they were poor tenants, using up all the hot water and refusing to bring down the tea plates so that mice sniff around (not that I have anything against mice, but I'm writing metaphorically here.) I mean they were the drug lord's cousin, all smiles and yessing but then sitting around drinking all of the Yoo-Hoo and putting wedges under your desk when you go to the bathroom...wait...I mean the drugs were, like, crows and the crows' brothers were elephants (just roll with me) who would be disappointed when the crows wouldn't dance, not even the hustle (see? So worth it!) I'm swimming in this neurochemical pool of mild mood shifting, and when I can look at it straight it feels like I can't decide whether or not to be in a good mood. The new pills are working, and it's making me suspicious.
Naturally I can't decide what to be suspicious of: am I normally in a good-enough mood and the chemicals are masking that and forcing this new, complacent fair mood on me? Am I one of those people for whom a good mood is just not really possible without some external support? Is it all a hoax perpetuated on the privileged white woman's health insurance, individual liver function be damned (CUE BIG PHARMA CEO TWIRLING MOUSTACHE, GRINNING EVIL STEEL-TOOTHED SMILE?) I think it's most probable that I've just been experiencing stress. For years. Lots of big, life-threatening, world-shattering, pelvic-floor-weakening, down-the-wrong-neural-path-making, pulling-clothes-out-of-a-sooty-wet-heap-happening, funeral-frequenting, present-forgetting, name-dropping-and-not-in-a-presumptuous-but-more-of-a-forgetting-your-best-friends'-name-way-sort-of-dropping, giant sucking chest would of a life. Not all of the time but...you know...enough.
There is a plan, though. I have a quest (sadly, there will be no genius illustrator/directors on this quest- but I'll smile if I crass any bridges.) I must teach my girl how to go door-to-door and ask the regular strangers if they've seen the cat, and I'll teach her how to tape flyers to absolutely everything. This is a life skill that she will never need, because of computers and such, but she'll learn it. It will make me feel good to teach it to her, and since we live in a neighborhood full of biddies who haven't had their nephews teach them how to use the internet yet, the quarter-pound of printer paper she used to make up flyers will actually help her get her cat back.
The best part about losing your cat is that everything snaps into action: your vision clears so that you can see the hawks circling, your ears pick up much more sound, including any high-pitched skreeeeeee from the neighbor's mower that could be mistaken for a cat provided said cat were being mangled, your breathing swells to accompany the panic-y thought of finding the animal and the ensuing attempt to pick it up. All this because your eleven-year-old's face is making a frown that will not turn upside-down no matter how many times you jokingly order it to do so. All the regular shit (and the irregular shit when you come right down to it) disappears like lightning and you can see what you have to do: tape flyers on everything. Yeah. Tape Flyers on Everything. You've been waiting. It's such parenting legend, such a milestone, that you can easily bring yourself to near-tears imagining how fucked up your kid is going to be if they don't lose their cat: how will they cope? Where will they learn the valuable life-lesson and current #3 Parenting Buzzword resiliency if they don't lose their/the family's pet? Will your child grow up not knowing the value of Taping Flyers to Everything? My God: what if your genius child goes to college not knowing- what if they start a band?? It'll be too late! No one's gonna teach them now! They'll end up practicing in your conservatory every night until 9:30 and insist that for their birthday you continue their guitar lessons forever!!
I'm a big fan of anything that will keep me motivated right now. I'm switching medications. The old ones were being rude to me by demanding my liver and kidneys and skin flush them out but they were poor tenants, using up all the hot water and refusing to bring down the tea plates so that mice sniff around (not that I have anything against mice, but I'm writing metaphorically here.) I mean they were the drug lord's cousin, all smiles and yessing but then sitting around drinking all of the Yoo-Hoo and putting wedges under your desk when you go to the bathroom...wait...I mean the drugs were, like, crows and the crows' brothers were elephants (just roll with me) who would be disappointed when the crows wouldn't dance, not even the hustle (see? So worth it!) I'm swimming in this neurochemical pool of mild mood shifting, and when I can look at it straight it feels like I can't decide whether or not to be in a good mood. The new pills are working, and it's making me suspicious.
Naturally I can't decide what to be suspicious of: am I normally in a good-enough mood and the chemicals are masking that and forcing this new, complacent fair mood on me? Am I one of those people for whom a good mood is just not really possible without some external support? Is it all a hoax perpetuated on the privileged white woman's health insurance, individual liver function be damned (CUE BIG PHARMA CEO TWIRLING MOUSTACHE, GRINNING EVIL STEEL-TOOTHED SMILE?) I think it's most probable that I've just been experiencing stress. For years. Lots of big, life-threatening, world-shattering, pelvic-floor-weakening, down-the-wrong-neural-path-making, pulling-clothes-out-of-a-sooty-wet-heap-happening, funeral-frequenting, present-forgetting, name-dropping-and-not-in-a-presumptuous-but-more-of-a-forgetting-your-best-friends'-name-way-sort-of-dropping, giant sucking chest would of a life. Not all of the time but...you know...enough.
There is a plan, though. I have a quest (sadly, there will be no genius illustrator/directors on this quest- but I'll smile if I crass any bridges.) I must teach my girl how to go door-to-door and ask the regular strangers if they've seen the cat, and I'll teach her how to tape flyers to absolutely everything. This is a life skill that she will never need, because of computers and such, but she'll learn it. It will make me feel good to teach it to her, and since we live in a neighborhood full of biddies who haven't had their nephews teach them how to use the internet yet, the quarter-pound of printer paper she used to make up flyers will actually help her get her cat back.
Friday, July 19, 2013
Things They Get Wrong
There is, for some godforsaken reason, a heatwave here. I am in the Fens, which is basically swampland- which is maybe why my partner took a shine to the place: he grew up in Chicago, built on a big swamp (the name "Chicago" is a derivative of the Native American phrase "Chika Chika boom boom", loosely translated to "location location location".) It was hot there, because it's the Midwest; but we Americans insist on settling places that should never be settled. We, as a nation, have the perverse compulsion to develop skyscrapers on extremely windy waterfront property and plop sushi restaurants in deserts. So we suffer the consequences of our decisions, like sweating out months of temperatures so high that the Europeans must translate the temperatures into Celcius just for their own peace of mind.
"I hear in Dallas they get to 50 in the summers, for days on end" they say.
When we moved here I was looking forward to being able to talk about the USA as one speaks of a forty-year-long fever. I'd get to describe the psychadelic dreams I'd had, like the Division of Motor Vehicles and beer that tastes like piss, and then I'd get to shudder and smile because I was free of it now that I'm here, in the glorious UK, where they are unapologetic about thier desire to keep certain people in fabulous jewelry their entire lives in exchange for said people's privacy, and where the summer temperatures never reach over 75 Fahrenheit. And if they do it's for a day, and the populace wanders around looking at the blue patches up in the air where the clouds have pulled away from the sun as if startled, and they take off their wool shepherd's caps or floor-length aprons to wipe the imperceptible damp from their brows and reminisce about the last time it reached 75, which was invariably during the Second World War. It's stayed warm, though, and I think we'll have to live with that: seems the earth is getting hotter over here, too.
It's not bad, I hear it gets to 50 C in Dallas, so I won't complain about anything other than the bugs. They are all over the house, because the British don't believe in screens. I'm not positive, but I think they don't believe in screens the way I don't believe in Santa. And the house isn't situated in any body's Wood (quick tip: the don't snicker after you say "Wood." It's like they don't know what it means.) There is no thick canopy to protect us from the normally reluctant sun, so it gets warm in the house, which means we are forced to open the unprotected windows, and within ten minutes the cat and dog are staring at different points in the air just above their heads with great, intent expressions. In the case of the cat the expression says "IwillkillyouIwillkillyouIwillkillyou you insignificant weirdly-legged speck that dares fly in the the no-fly zone above my fiefdom," and in the case of the dog it's "bug! bug! bug!...bug! bug!...uh...bug!" Both pounce; both succeed every third try; both attempt to eat it. There are forty day flies per pet per cubic foot per hour, though, and while it's entertaining to watch them hurtle themselves and discuss the different jump-and-claw-owner's-leg techniques they employ, it ends up being too many bugs and we wake up with their carcasses floating peacefully in all but one of the coffee cups. It gives you the heebie-jeebies.
I've taken to walking to our local village because I like walking and there's a footpath behind some fields that goes right there; I already had a slouchy wide-brimmed straw hat, so I figured why fight it. It's beautiful. Then I get to the village and go to the library or supermarket and cannot find any water fountains. Not even the gym we just joined- called a Leisure Centre here, because why be coy: no one's going to exercise- has any of the obnoxiously frequent water fountains that are all over the YMCA I patronized. The only one I could find was tucked into the locker room's corner, and looked just like a WWII-era sink because it clearly is one. There's a sign that says "public water" just underneath it, located at the very convenient five-inches-above-the-floor level; to get water you have to leeeaaan over and twist another knob and stick your face about six inches into its' well. Eventually water comes out, resenting you for not heating it up and putting tea in it. I'm American, dammit, and I refuse to carry a water bottle! It's slightly annoying, so I wont' do it!
The worst thing is that when you go into a pub and sit down at a table, you have to approach the bar itself to get a beer. Sure, it's tepid beer, kept that way because it's not the frothy urine produced in mind-boggling quantities in America, keeping our keggers affordable . And sure, there's about 5oo beers here that are on tap at every pub and tavern and convenience store, and even the crap beers are still the kind you'd read favorably about in Beer Moustache magazine. You have to pick your ass up and move it to the bar so that you can purchase your drinks and then go sit back down. At my very first pub I politely asked for a beer from the waitress who came over and asked if she could get anything else from us besides our order; she was young and stood blinking at me for a moment before she said "sure, I'll bring that out." My husband told me that it's just not done. No exceptions, even though every one's thighs are sheathed in a light sweat at all times and we are all leaving damp patches on the bar stools (no, not that kind of damp patch! That is also just not done. I dearly hope.)
It's gotten to the point where I'm almost not enchanted with this country. Stupid heatwave.
"I hear in Dallas they get to 50 in the summers, for days on end" they say.
When we moved here I was looking forward to being able to talk about the USA as one speaks of a forty-year-long fever. I'd get to describe the psychadelic dreams I'd had, like the Division of Motor Vehicles and beer that tastes like piss, and then I'd get to shudder and smile because I was free of it now that I'm here, in the glorious UK, where they are unapologetic about thier desire to keep certain people in fabulous jewelry their entire lives in exchange for said people's privacy, and where the summer temperatures never reach over 75 Fahrenheit. And if they do it's for a day, and the populace wanders around looking at the blue patches up in the air where the clouds have pulled away from the sun as if startled, and they take off their wool shepherd's caps or floor-length aprons to wipe the imperceptible damp from their brows and reminisce about the last time it reached 75, which was invariably during the Second World War. It's stayed warm, though, and I think we'll have to live with that: seems the earth is getting hotter over here, too.
It's not bad, I hear it gets to 50 C in Dallas, so I won't complain about anything other than the bugs. They are all over the house, because the British don't believe in screens. I'm not positive, but I think they don't believe in screens the way I don't believe in Santa. And the house isn't situated in any body's Wood (quick tip: the don't snicker after you say "Wood." It's like they don't know what it means.) There is no thick canopy to protect us from the normally reluctant sun, so it gets warm in the house, which means we are forced to open the unprotected windows, and within ten minutes the cat and dog are staring at different points in the air just above their heads with great, intent expressions. In the case of the cat the expression says "IwillkillyouIwillkillyouIwillkillyou you insignificant weirdly-legged speck that dares fly in the the no-fly zone above my fiefdom," and in the case of the dog it's "bug! bug! bug!...bug! bug!...uh...bug!" Both pounce; both succeed every third try; both attempt to eat it. There are forty day flies per pet per cubic foot per hour, though, and while it's entertaining to watch them hurtle themselves and discuss the different jump-and-claw-owner's-leg techniques they employ, it ends up being too many bugs and we wake up with their carcasses floating peacefully in all but one of the coffee cups. It gives you the heebie-jeebies.
I've taken to walking to our local village because I like walking and there's a footpath behind some fields that goes right there; I already had a slouchy wide-brimmed straw hat, so I figured why fight it. It's beautiful. Then I get to the village and go to the library or supermarket and cannot find any water fountains. Not even the gym we just joined- called a Leisure Centre here, because why be coy: no one's going to exercise- has any of the obnoxiously frequent water fountains that are all over the YMCA I patronized. The only one I could find was tucked into the locker room's corner, and looked just like a WWII-era sink because it clearly is one. There's a sign that says "public water" just underneath it, located at the very convenient five-inches-above-the-floor level; to get water you have to leeeaaan over and twist another knob and stick your face about six inches into its' well. Eventually water comes out, resenting you for not heating it up and putting tea in it. I'm American, dammit, and I refuse to carry a water bottle! It's slightly annoying, so I wont' do it!
The worst thing is that when you go into a pub and sit down at a table, you have to approach the bar itself to get a beer. Sure, it's tepid beer, kept that way because it's not the frothy urine produced in mind-boggling quantities in America, keeping our keggers affordable . And sure, there's about 5oo beers here that are on tap at every pub and tavern and convenience store, and even the crap beers are still the kind you'd read favorably about in Beer Moustache magazine. You have to pick your ass up and move it to the bar so that you can purchase your drinks and then go sit back down. At my very first pub I politely asked for a beer from the waitress who came over and asked if she could get anything else from us besides our order; she was young and stood blinking at me for a moment before she said "sure, I'll bring that out." My husband told me that it's just not done. No exceptions, even though every one's thighs are sheathed in a light sweat at all times and we are all leaving damp patches on the bar stools (no, not that kind of damp patch! That is also just not done. I dearly hope.)
It's gotten to the point where I'm almost not enchanted with this country. Stupid heatwave.
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