a mommy moment?
The tears began once we were back outside by the car.
Richard hugged me, laughing in the nicest way.
I buried my face in his shirt and he said, "Are we having a mommy moment?"
Of a sort, yes, we were.
***
Richard and I both travel in our jobs. Not constantly, but enough to have favorite airlines and car agencies, and a comprehensive list of NPR stations and WiFi hot spots. Our travel schedules have been easy enough to manage, but now we have a wrinkle in the equation = Bryn the dog.
I work from home, so in the month since we adopted her, Bryn has had a lot of companionship. Visibly, she has bonded to us and to our house, and has become a part of our lives. We take her for walks, play ball with her, and Richard washes her when she has rolled in pungent effluvia. I take her out over lunchtime, and in the afternoon she sleeps in the sun outside on the back porch. She's a good dog, a happy errand buddy who waits patiently at the coffee shop and an ever alert guardian who hears strangers two blocks away.
She's three or four years old. We don't know anything about her early life, save that the SF pound took her in after she had been abandoned with a litter of puppies. The pound treated her wounds, her puppies were adopted, and from there she went to the SPCA where we found her. "Rescued her from durrance vile," as Richard puts it.
***
And then comes the two business trips at the same time. Richard heads south while I go east, and we don't know our neighbors well enough yet to ask them to care for Bryn for several days.
So we decide to board her at the vet. Twenty caring staff members, clean kennels and outdoor dog runs. Kind strangers and metal kennels, a combination Bryn has lived before.
There is no way of telling Bryn that this stay in the metal kennels with the kind strangers is only for a couple of days. No way of telling her this is a sort of doggie vacation and we'll all be home together soon. She looked panicked when they led her away. Her confused and imploring eyes locked with mine as the door closed between us.
And so here we are at the car, about to go to the airport.
It won't be as bad next time. Next time there will be a track record - she goes off to the kennel, people are decent to her, and she comes back home to play ball on the beach with Richard.
But this time it hurts - I feel as if I've abandoned someone who's only be faithful to me.
Sorting the threads
One of my cousin Janine's many gifts is her magical reweaving ability -- clothes, not hair.
If you bring her a sweater that has holes or snags where the weaving has clearly come apart, she slowly, persistently, magically works it all back together.
A dozen years ago my sister Julie gave me a green cable knit sweater I have worn to pieces. With my ridiculous abundance of clothing, I continue to wear this damned thing! But this old green cotton sweater sums up everything good about winter. And reminds me of the Beloved Jules. So year after year, I beg Janine for another Christmas Reweaving Miracle -- it is after all the Season...
With this blog, I'm trying to do something somewhat opposite -- isolate a thread from the weave of my life, and pull it out just a little on its own. Find the humor and joy in the daily pages of life, and spin out something perhaps funny, fragile, absurd.
I'm serious about conquering my vertigo, but I think humor helps win the fight.
If I'm going to write about the more serious things... well, that seems to call for another blog. Enter
http://m25.blogspot.com/
stage left.
In May, I'll be going on a trip to the UK to learn -- among other things -- about the pervasive practices of human (sex) trafficking and gender crimes. The trip won't be all sad times -- there will be dinners with friends, worship with artists -- good nourishing things.
I don't know where this trip will lead, or what I'll wind up doing back here in San Francisco because of the trip. But this seems a journey worth taking, and worth chronicling.
And who knows, maybe next Christmas I'll bring my two blogs to Janine instead of my sweater...see if she can find a way to weave the threads back together for me.
Up the down staircase
I've been wondering when I would fall.
Mercifully, all I hurt were the gluteous maximus muscles, and they have a protective cushion.
I have vertigo, and stairs of almost any description are a problem for me. The stairs in our townhouse have a dog leg -- you head east for four steps before reaching a landing and turning north for the remaining 16. There is a bannister on one side and a wall on the other, which helps my balance.
But still, I am the slowest one down the steps, often placing both feet on a step before going down to the next one. Between the telescoping motion of the steps and the multiplication process of vertigo, I have trouble figuring out where to put my foot. It's only near the end that the spiral whirling of the seven stairways stops, and I can confidently run down (left-right-left-right) the last few steps.
We invited our neighbor Lee over for dinner last weekend. We clean the house from top to bottom at least once a week, but in his honor I had been overzealous with the floor polish. Everything is hardwood flooring except the kitchen and bathroom, and I had polished even the wooden stairs.
Coming back downstairs during dinner, my feet slipped out from under me and -- bump bump bump -- down the stairs I went. Richard jumped up from the table and ran to me, followed by Bryn the Dog. Lee stood up, looking concerned.
I, on the other hand, was more relieved than anything else. I had finally fallen here, and it wasn't so bad. The bruising lasted all week, and I'm still slow getting started at the top, but I'm a little easier about things now, and the seven sets of stairs don't swirl as fast as they once did.
Whatever is going on in my inner ear (part of the vertigo resides there) may be lessening a bit.
If only I could say as much for the rest of my head.
Festivus for the rest of us
My sense of this blog as "the poor woman's Seinfeld" -- the blogsitcom about nothing -- increased last night in a conversation with my husband.
Richard is a multi-faceted jewel of a man. Reflections of other people can be seen as the light hits him in motion. He's like Jerry Seinfeld when it comes to neatness, the Soup Nazi when it comes to the kitchen, and now--alarmingly--I'm seeing the emergence of a combo-character: part Cosmo Kramer, part Mr. Costanza (George's father).
Here's what happened.
It started so innocently... He's mulling over the crossword puzzle (I'm a Sudoku fan, myself) and murmurs, "Ingredient in a fizz..."
I pop up with a perky, "Gin."
He nods, "But that doesn't fit -- they're looking for another ingredient, a liqueur of some sort."
I'm of no help, having never had a gin fizz.
This sparks another train of thought.
"You play gin rummy, don't you?" he asks.
"Of course, learned it at my grandfather's knee."
"I should teach you Hollywood Gin," he says with sudden Kramer-like enthusiasm. He didn't actually slide through an open doorway and across the room, shirt tails flapping, but he could have.
Immediately, I'm suspicious.
"Is this one of those games you keep inflicting on me -- one your father made up and you always change the rules while we're playing to make sure you win?"
Ruffled Italian honor takes umbrage: "I don't know what you're talking about."
I start naming the fake games.
He interrupts, "Nonsense, shh, quiet, you're upsetting the dog. Now, here's how you play Hollywood Gin."
So he launches into this dealing scheme where you have three piles of cards in front of you, and each pile contains one card face up and one card face down.
"Blackjack!" I yell, "Or poker! This isn't gin!"
He quells me with a stern look. "It is gin, and the three columns..."
Yada yada yada he goes into this long dissertation I'm certain is impromptu creativity, and then he says: "And if I reach a hundred in all three of my columns, before you reach a hundred in your first column, then I call out "Schneid!" and win the game."
"Schneid!?" I respond, indeed waking the dog, "Schneid isn't a word you say in gin. Schneid isn't even a real word. It's like Festivus for the Rest-of-us. Your father is Mr. Costanza! Do we play this game while sitting around a metal pole?"
While he sulks, I go online.
Grrrr.
There is something called "Hollywood Gin," and apparently Gin Rummy was a hot card game among Hollywood stars of the 1920s and 30s.
And... Schneid is a word too.
(sigh)
So we're going to play this weekend.
As soon as I start winning, he'll change the rules and suddenly yell, "Schneid!"
My only possible reply will be: "Serenity Now!"
Definition from www.word-detective.com
"The schneid" is a another good example of such a term, and, coincidentally, means nearly the opposite of "in the catbird seat." To be "on the schneid" means to be on a losing streak, racking up a series of losing, and especially scoreless, games. "Schneid" is actually short for "schneider," a term originally used in the card game of gin, meaning to prevent an opponent from scoring any points. "Schneider" entered the vocabulary of gin from German (probably via Yiddish), where it means "tailor." Apparently the original sense was that if you were "schneidered" in gin you were "cut" (as if by a tailor) from contention in the game. "Schneider" first appeared in the literature of card-playing about 1886, but the shortened form "schneid" used in other sports is probably of fairly recent vintage.I should never have let him watch "Seinfeld."
