To be Written on a Vine Leaf, or Vignettes

They are crouching in the bath-like waters of the Albemarle Sound when the dog stands up on two legs and begins to walk.  A white bird lands on the glassy surface in the distance, and spotting it touch down, the dog simply rears up and stands.

‘Look!’ she squeals,’ look at the dog!’

He turns and grins.  Madly almost. And begins to laugh.  He twists to get a better hold of their daughter, and not wanting him to take his eyes off the dog for a moment because who knows how long the dog will continue to walk, she says again more forcefully, ‘LOOK.’

Five, six, seven seconds pass as the dog sloshes through the water on his hind legs toward the pier and the most concentric circle made by the fowl on the surface.

She’s seen another dog do this, her family dog growing up.  Murphy, a short statured and wiry haired terrier had a knack for circus like tricks. 

‘He also understands English,’ her mother had once said.

They were driving to Pittsburg to visit her brother.  She must have been in high school.  Her brother and sister-in-law were still newlyweds, and work and school had taken them a few states away.  From Chicago, the jeep had rattled along the busy interstates for hundreds of miles, and Murphy sat unperturbed on the console.  When they began to exit the off ramp, it was as if the dog knew they were nearing their destination.  As the car curved around the circular ramp, the dog slowly lifted his front paws off the console and sat, on his behind with his front paws facing outward.  They had screamed in glee, her mother and she amazed that the dog was stable enough to steady himself against the hard plastic and without restraints.

‘He’s walking!’ she says, narrating the scene when no narration is necessary.  Their infant daughter laughs, and just as soon as he had walked, the dog descends back into the water, leaving her and her husband to wonder if such a sight had just happened or if they were seeing things.  Odd biblical visions.

The dog turns and groans toward the shore.

‘He’s worried about her,’ her husband says, nodding his chin toward the beach where the little dog sits shivering surveying her owners but unwilling to step in the water again.  When they had brought her out and let her swim, the elderly dog paddled ferociously back toward her, toward the safety of her embrace, leaving deep red scratches on her arms as she tried to climb up and out. 

They had laughed again at the frantic dog’s instinctive paddling, even though in her heart she wondered if the dog were slightly afraid.  What if she has a heart attack, she worried, and then tried to replace that worry with the thought that perhaps swimming in the sound was on the elderly dog’s bucket list.

A ridiculous thought, as though dogs could have a bucket list.
                                                           
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She is reading a book about a couple, one in which tiny scenes are played out between a forty year something courtship when she is hit with the realization that someday she too will grow old.  Or more frightening, so will he.

They had attended an unfamiliar church near the beach.  The floors were made of concrete, slightly angling into valleys with drains.  She points it out to her husband,

‘The floor is concrete and there are water drains,’ she whispers to him.  ‘For the hurricanes,’ she adds.  And it makes her shiver, to be in a place where nature has such power.  The observation is both humbling and fascinating.  The way that church should be, she supposes.

‘Most humans only live up to 1/10 of their potential,’ the priest bellows from the stage.  ‘Imagine what you could do if you didn’t hide your talents,’ he furthers.

It is an odd sermon for a Catholic church, she thinks.  Too touchy and feel-good.  But of that, she can’t be sure.  Though she has been to hundreds of Catholic services throughout her life, she rarely listens to the homilies.  Even when she makes a concerted effort, she usually ends up drifting off about five minutes into the speech.  Imagine what she could do if she listened more, she thinks, but then again, she’s always felt that those homilies didn’t apply to her.  She just didn’t feel the same way everyone else did, and most of the time in church she spent secretly stealing glances at individuals within the congregation and wondered what they had that made this homily so applicable to them?

What was she missing?  It wasn’t that she wholly unreligious, or spiritual, but she just couldn’t feel whatever it was that she was supposed to feel.  The only times she ever cried in church were when the family with the child with Downs Syndrome shuffled in before her, late with faces that read apologetic smiles.  When the girl glanced around she would study her face, amazed at the light that seemed to radiate from within.  But she didn’t want the girl to think she was staring at her in a way that would make her uncomfortable, so she always looked away before getting caught. 

The truth was, there was something in that little girl that made her feel the way that church was supposed to make one feel, or so she thought.  Illuminated somehow.  She felt called to take her hand and be her friend, but even doing that designated the girl as other and that made her feel ashamed.  So she wept.  Her husband grabbed her hand, worried that something was wrong, but she flicked it away, smiled, and quickly dried her tears.  She hated to appear vulnerable in a public place: weak, uncontrolled.  But when she looked back and watched the girl grab her brother’s hand, she felt comforted. The little girl seemed to realize her gifts.  Maybe that’s what the old priest was rambling about.  There was something miraculous about her lightness. 

She was afraid to say that she was a ‘spiritual’ person, because she had once heard someone, a man, make fun of women for calling themselves ‘spiritual.’  It pained her that she cared so much to shape her own worldview by the casual toss-off observation of someone whom she couldn’t remember.  But that had been it.  She had cared too much what others thought.  Carried it with her, shaping her, until she couldn’t quite recall what it was that she believed in the first place.

When she was a little girl, her parish priest often showed up to service drunk.  Once, she recalls, a classmate of hers, a girl named Louise, had lost her father.   To Cancer? Or maybe a heart attack.  She remembers Louise and her two sisters sitting in the front pew, holding hands.  Louise’s mother’s hair was gray, so different from her own mother, who often looked young and radiant, though tragedy had struck her too.  But she was not so in the midst.  Well, her mother was always in the midst, she supposes, just not the hazy fog that prevents the car from driving straight.  Her mother, she figured, had simply grown used to the fog, had remembered the curve of the road, the stops, the turns by rote now. 

‘Louisa, over here, her father just died,’ the priest had said in front of the pulpit. 

So casually, as though he was pointing to the produce section of a grocery store and sighing, ‘well, we’re out of lemons.’

They stopped going to church for a while after that, or maybe for a long time. Her mother, angry with the priest, had decided. It was just as well, because she no longer had to feign sick before Sunday services.

The priest entered rehab, she later heard, but she didn’t care too much about him to follow up and dismissed the news as he so often had, acknowledging that maybe there were too many lemons running the church anyway.

These are the things she thinks about when she’s supposed to be thinking about something else, when she’s secretly studying other faces and wondering if their priest had ever shown up drunk, or worse.  Maybe it wouldn’t matter to them, but for her, it mattered.  It always did.

But her husband is a reverent Catholic, and so she agreed to go some twenty years later.  Every Sunday she sits in the pew next to him, imagining what the others are hearing and why she doesn’t hear it and never thinking that she too will grow old.

Maybe then she’ll listen. 

But for now, she stretches her youth.

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They had arrived at the beach bungalow around one, weary, tense.  It wasn’t how vacations were supposed to start, but didn’t they always? The travel? The traffic?

‘You can never relax,’ she had teased him, half accusingly.

‘I know. I told you that,’ he said, matching her tone. 

It was another one of those compromises she was unwilling to accept- she knows they both thought.  She wasn’t so cliché as to think she could change him, she knew she could.

But not in the way a woman wants to change a man, but in the way one wants to help them realize that they are finally safe.
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She had wanted to go to the beach so much so that when they woke and she had to wait over an hour to organize everything, she grew impatient.  She was impatient when it came to things like the ocean.  She could never be too close, too soon.

They wound their way around streets that revealed dunes and majestic houses.

‘We’ll go the National Seashore,’ he had said optimistically.

But twenty minutes later she had looked at a map and realized that the seashore destination was nearly forty minutes away. 

She had told him that and he felt defensive.  Sometimes she wished she didn’t do such things, letting her mouth run with such a tone, because she was sure all he heard was the unintended criticism.

But was almost impossible to control her when she heard the ocean.

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Sharks.  Rip Tides.  Everything was an excuse, as she stood dipping her toes into the foam left behind from breaking waves.  Once he had accused her of living in fear too much, but she knew she was right to be afraid.  The water was very dangerous; she understood its siren call on a genetic level.

Instead, he runs toward the ocean and dives head first into a wave.  She watches him bob and disappear.  He looks like a dolphin, the way his muscular body cuts through the watery wall, swallowed by the ocean, resurfacing moments later in fantastic show.

He grabs her hand and pulls her in toward the depths. 

‘I don’t want to get caught in a rip tide!’ she shouts, remembering the park ranger who had lead the to the beach. 

‘There’s no swimming today,’ she warned agreeably.  ‘Well, not within the life guard zones, other than that, it’s at your own risk.’

She smiled.  ‘Please be careful.’

Her husband hadn’t listened like she had because she understood what the waters could and would do, and when he resurfaced he shouted to the shore he shouted, ‘there’s a strong current!’

‘I know!’ she yells back, hoping her voice will carry over the deafening boom, and even when he grabs her hand and she yells that she was afraid of sharks he answers, ‘You know, you’d love it if you saw one!’

And she has to admit, he is right. 

‘Only if I lived to tell!’ she returns.

‘You’ll only live to tell if you try it!’ he answers before diving beneath the surface of another wave.

She wades out, tries to replicate his dive, but standing between the shore and the wave, unable to move before it breaks, she is picked up and thrown onto the ocean floor.  Powerless, careening through haze, her legs splayed in such a fashion that she can’t tell up from down.  She smacks her arm against the sand until hours pass and eventually the water pulls back, leaving her gasping for air on the wet beach like a piece of mangled driftwood.

She laughs, shrieks! Because she feels so full of life even as a piece of mangled driftwood and only in the way one can only do when realizing they have no control.

She thinks she’s been standing in that place too often in life, the place too far from the safety of the shore or the crest.  That place where the wave breaks and you are sent hurling.

Maybe we’d use more than 1/10th of our potential, she thinks, if we weren’t always standing at the breaking point, paralyzed and unwilling to go forward but too proud and ashamed to step back.

                                                                       ********************
When they pick up the bikes from the shop and strap her daughter in the infant seat, she asks if her husband would ride behind her, if only for a while.  It doesn’t seem sturdy, the single plastic strap that holds her daughter into the seat. 

‘Will you watch her?’ she begs.  ‘Is she OK?’ she asks no less than five times within one block.

‘Would you like to switch with me so you can watch her,’ her asks?

‘No,’ she responds, because she doesn’t want her out of arms reach.  If she hits a bump and her bike goes careening over the hill, she wants to be able to stop it.  To reach out and grab her child in some acrobatic feat of her own scraped knees and a bruised head.  She wouldn’t care, because she’d be safe. 

She peddles three miles with her daughter’s feet kicking at her from behind, all the while imagining scenarios in which she’d be called to sacrifice herself to the gods of asphalt all to prevent her daughter from any bruises.  She obsesses about it so much so that it isn’t until the trail heads over a small stream that she feels like she is in the low country.  Off in the distance, a cricket chips.  Or maybe it is a frog.

When she sees a rusted airboat lying dilapidated against a stream not deep enough to support it, the weeds curling over the sides she says to her husband, ‘I like it here better than the beach.’  But really it is because everything feels hidden, covered, undiscovered.  Even the air, cloying and heavy, seems to obscure tiny treasures.  She wonders why she feels so at home, when the only home she’d ever known had been on the Midwestern praries.

Maybe because on the prairie with all its openness and views for miles takes more effort to hide the family secrets, whereas here the ground and vegetation is softer, more forgiving, padding any sort of misstep or fall.

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She reads until her eyes burn and leans her head against the chair and closes her eyes.  When she opens them, she is staring at the stars.

The heavens, she thinks, people have always looked toward the heavens.  Even when they didn’t want to, there must be some biological function where the neck, weary, descends back so that one can only look up.  For answers.

She meets an elderly woman on the street walking a tiny daschund, his cord made of fabric remnants.  The elderly woman asked about her daughter’s name, and when she reveals it to the woman, her eyes seem to sparkle. 

‘That is a saint’s name,’ the elderly woman says.  ‘The saint of light, of luz.’

‘Yes,’ she says.

When she shortens her daughter’s name, it comes out as luz, luz.  ‘Light, light!’ Which is fitting.  She is light.

The elderly woman introduces herself, in broken English. 

‘I am Prudencia,’ she says, rolling the r’s so that it sounds even more exotic.  But she thinks only of the Beatles song, and the entire time the elderly woman talks, all she can hear is

‘Dear Prudence, open up your eyes
Dear Prudence, see the sunny skies
The wind is low the birds will sing
That you are part of everything
Dear Prudence, won't you open up your eyes?’

‘My husband has been gone for three years now,’ she says, rolling the r’s on the three.  ‘He was a gringo, but he was a good gringo,’ she says with a smile.  And then she begins to cry. 

She wraps her arms around the elderly woman and thinks what a funny picture they must make.  Two women, two drastically different points in life, strangers, standing in the street with their arms wrapped around one another.

‘My husband was a good man,’ she says calling her dog.  She points to the make shift chain and says, ‘I do alterations.  I am the best!’ she exclaims, breaking from the hug.

Twenty minutes later, the two women disengage, the elderly woman walking taller, taller than before, as if she were wrapped in water, preventing her fall, tiny particles holding her up because she sees something, something worth walking toward.

Later that week, she sees the elderly woman sitting in the last pew of the beach church. 

She looks illuminated.  And she wonders if she too has recognized her talents, or at least 4/10th of them.

She asks this question about Dear Prudence as she stares at the sky and wonders if Prudence also looks up, seeking answers.  Wondering if she made him feel safe? 

Did he make her feel safe?

It seems that way as she exits church.  Taller somehow, but unafraid of walking forward, happy to look back, but mostly unconcerned about the asphalt beneath.

Driving to Africa

This morning I sat at my kitchen table and debated the many ways to legally inject coffee into my veins while internally punishing myself for thinking it was a brilliant idea to defend a former contestant on The Bachelor last night. I like to call these moments, 'driving to Africa,' because they are either so awful or so embarrassing, that if there was a way to get into your car and just drive to Africa, you would.

Coffee in hand, I proceeded to do what I do every morning: I checked CNN and then hit refresh on my Facebook newsfeed.  I am not actually that embarrassed to admit this morning ritual.  When I was working eighty hour plus weeks, I spent most mornings slamming a sugarless Red Bull and completing the rounds of returning calls. One and half years later, I find myself at home with a five month old and some eight hundred miles away from my former employment.  It’s silly, but Facebook occasionally makes me feel like I’m not so far away from my former life, especially after being cooped up in the house for three days because my kid is teething and I can’t be bothered to brush my hair or change out of my pajamas.

When I hit refresh, a posting from one of my exes hit the top of my newsfeed. Recently engaged, I can honestly offer that I am very thrilled for him.  We didn’t have the best breakup, but he’s a wonderful person and it seems (from what I can glean from Facebook) that his wife-to-be is a lovely girl: alls well that ends well kind of thing.  Clicking on his page revealed a few posts from his fiancé (am I a stalker?  It sure would seem that way) about how excited she was about the completion of their pre-marital counseling.  It made me smile. I remember those days.

Which brings me to a deep, and dark admission: I really, really love it when people are genuinely happy. 

(Note, unless said happiness is derived from hurting people because that is not cool. I’m looking at you, kid who I lent a pencil to in the fourth grade and you broke it in front of my face and laughed.  Also, killers. Your happiness sucks).

One of my biggest pet peeves is the ‘build them up to bring them down’ kind of culture.  Don’t get me wrong, anyone that knows me knows I’m guilty of laughing at sarcastic comments of the ‘what the heck is s/he wearing variety,’ hell, I’m guilty of making those comments. But in what can feel like an exceedingly depressing state of affairs in this country, I love to see those little bits of happiness poke through.  Life goes on. People get married.  People get promoted at work. Babies are born. And for a lucky few, your favored sports team heads to the World Series, The National Championship or the Super Bowl (what does that feel like, by the way?)

Perhaps it is because my husband’s job takes him out to the field for a week at a time, and those nights when he comes home ‘early’ most prime-time television is already over and Lucy has long been in bed, but reading about my exes excitement at his upcoming wedding made me appreciate and miss my own husband that much more.

There is probably nothing more true that the statement, ‘marriage is hard work.’ It is. It is really hard work.  In fact, it seems inaccurate and inclusive to limit this solely to marriage, so let’s say, ‘relationships of any kid are hard work.’  But, like anything worth doing, it is also so incredibly rewarding.  Matt and I have always joked that we see two paths, one that is paved with shiny yellow bricks, and the other one that is paved with hot coal, flanked by poison ivy and lined by dark and impenetrable woods and we say, ‘you know, I bet those coals aren’t that hot.’

 In efforts to be cheerful, many military spouses will say that deployments and the time spent apart makes the marriage that much stronger.  ‘You don’t get sick of him! You get to miss him!’   In all fairness, I’d like to hand it to the overly cheerful military wives of this world who have spun painfully missing someone into a positive thing. Good for you.  Remind me again, what is it that you’re on? I kid. I kid. (We’ll talk later).

I digress.

Missing my husband for a week is a heck of a lot better than missing him for seven months to a year, but it does help me reflect on how lucky I am so that the whole, ‘missing him’ thing can’t be all wrong.  Which is how I felt when I saw the postings of two crazy in love individuals and thought, you know what? It would be easy to bring them down and say, ‘Enjoy it now, it doesn’t last,’ but that’s just simply not true. 

There’s too much of that going on in this world, I think.  One can’t read the comments section of any major news outlet and not find a bevy of really, really unhappy people.  In fact, if one spent a day simply reading the comments sections of most articles, an image would form of the general state of unhappiness in this country so that it seemed like all of the US was holding a gun to its head and a bottle of whiskey in the other saying, ‘well, it’s been a nice run.’ 

As a note: if anyone who is reading this is one of those online posters that insists on commenting on every online article with something like, ‘Save yourselves, this country is really going to hell and there’s nothing we can do about it!!!!!!!!’ Just stop.  Seriously, stop. You’re totally annoying. I bet the whole of people in the US during the Civil War weren’t sitting there going, ‘Hot Damn! This is awesome! This country is doing swimmingly!’ (Those crazy picnickers that sat on battlefields excluded).  The point is, like any relationship worth fighting for, it does not behoove one to maniacally and continually suggest jumping ship.

I read a survey once that said something like, ‘according to Facebook, 90% of the world’s status’ reflect positive emotions.’  OK, I’m totally making that figure up, but I remember it was really, really high.  Higher than I expected, actually.  Which makes me think, wouldn’t it be fantastic if instead of concentrating on all the bad in the world, we could all- just for a bit- concentrate on all the good?

Pollyanna? Yes. But if the old adage is misery loves company, then can’t there be an equal and opposite adage? Like, misery loves company, but on the other side of the room, happiness has grabbed the mic and is blasting out a rendition of ‘Don’t Stop Believin’?  That metaphor/comparison may not have really worked, but well, you get what I’m saying.

 ‘There will be times when you briefly consider burning down the house, getting in the car, and driving to Africa,’ I want to say to the happy couple, ‘but then there will be times when you look at that person and think to yourself, ‘how in the hell did I get so lucky?’’

Well, hopefully you will remember that.  If both partners truly do love and respect one another. And you’re not Kim Kardashian.

That’s not to say that my husband and I haven’t had our arguments. Our house doesn’t manufacture rainbows or anything.  We are both, by nature, passionate and dramatic individuals. Once, I read an interview in one of the myriad women’s magazines (after a while, the titles blend together) of Penelope Cruz. In it she laughed about the passionate arguments she’d had with some Latin lover that involved her smashing plates on the floor and watching the pieces shatter and dance around the tile. She made it sound almost delightful, like performance art.

There was a time when my husband innocently tried to call me jealous in regards to one of his work colleagues.  ‘JEALOUS?!’ I had erupted, much to his shock, ‘I AM NOT JEALOUS!’ Though it would seem that I was indeed jealous after inciting this type of reaction.  In reality, I was mostly incensed that at time when he attempted to playfully insult me, he had chosen an adjective that couldn’t be further from the truth.  Something about that really ticked me off.  And worse, he actually truly believed that my reaction to his story was because I was jealous, (and not, as was the truth, a reaction to the sandwich I was eating).

‘CALL ME FINANCIALLY IRRESPONSIBLE! OR AN OVERREACTOR! OR LIVES IN FANTASY-LAND OR HATES IT WHEN THE PAPER CASING THAT SURROUNDS STRAWS GETS WETS AND LOOKS LIKE A BLIND WORM (all of which may be my more negative characteristics) BUT JEALOUS IS NOT ONE OF THEM! My husband responded with shock and he raised his voice, ‘Now hold on here, why is it wrong to be jealous? You’re jealous!’

Occasionally my mind betrays me, and the devil on my shoulder wins. In eyeshot, I saw a plate. Recalling Penelope’s dramatic inclinations, I quickly grabbed it with my hands.  In the corner of my eye I could see my husband’s grow to roughly the size of that plate. ‘I AM NOT JEALOUS!’ I shouted and promptly smashed the plate on the floor.

In that moment, I caught my reflection in the mirror.  Unfortunately, I did not resemble Penelope Cruz.  If I were to suggest I looked like any actress, it was probably be much closer to Charlize Theron's heart-breaking portrayal of serial killer Eileen Wournos in ‘Monster’.  My hair was wild (and not the sexy kind, but in the Medusa way), my nose was running and mascara was smeared across my eyelids so that the upper portion of my face looked decorated with the kind of designs worn by wild Banshees before battle.

We both stood there for a moment as I stifled the urge to laugh. My husband’s face froze in the type of look generally reserved in children the first time they see a tiger in the zoo. Eventually, he walked to the corner and found the broom and dustpan and began sweeping it up.

‘It was only $3.00 or something,’ I helpfully offered.

‘That’s really not the point,’ he said.

That was one of those drive to Africa moments.  I don’t care how perfect your marriage or relationship is, you will have them. And you will even consider boarding a rickety plane that you’re pretty sure will crash in the Sahara Desert and even that sounds better than standing in the room with someone who is as angry with you as you are with them. Especially when you know you’re right.

Usually, as it is the custom however, those moments pass and fill themselves with happier ones.  And you can admit that smashing a plate on the floor in an imagined feat of glory was not romantic and passionate, but really, really stupid. 

For those moments of goofiness, I am grateful for something as silly as Facebook. Why? Because I like reading good news more than bad news.

I suppose there’s irony in my post; I like Facebook, but chastise online comment sections.  Maybe because there’s less anonymity in Facebook.  Maybe because it’s a lot tougher to look (or write) people in the face and really say, ‘you’re a jerk and this country is going to hell’ when there’s an image of you attached to it completely plastered and holding a lampshade at your best friend’s wedding.

In the end, I didn’t actually comment on his page, because let’s be honest, that would be really creepy.  I’m sure his fiancé would say, ‘who is this girl commenting on my happy marriage post?’ And he’d have to say something like, ‘that’s my ex or, that’s this girl I passed on the street once who always dyed her hair really stupid colors,’ and she’d say, ‘wow, that’s incredibly weird,’ and frankly, she’d be right.  

But in those moments of sharing (even externally) in others happiness, I myself am selfishly transported to recall my own happiness.  I can’t promise I won’t want to drive to Africa again, or that I even won’t have one of those moments today, but at the very least I know at some point I will sit down at the computer and re-watch that episode of The Bachelor I thought it was such a good idea to defend against those unhappy posters last night and think, ‘Ben really needs to cut his hair.’

Oh, and ‘I’m grateful for the happiness that surrounds me.’

On an anniversary: a note of remembrance and love for my brother.

I never met him.  Perhaps that will always be my life’s biggest regret, even if it means regretting events entirely out of my control.  Regardless, he, perhaps in some way as much as my parents, has had a profound effect upon my life.  So for that, I consider myself supremely lucky. 

Chris on left, Kevin on right.  Halloween.

He taught me to be humble, for there are always people making bigger sacrifices.  He taught me to treat people with as much kindness as possible, even in the face of fear or aggression, because behind closed doors I could not know or even understand the battles they fought.  He taught me to be ambitious and maintain focus, even when challenges or goals seemed impossibly out of my reach.  He taught me to never discount the underdog, because they are often filled with the most grit and loyalty.  He taught me to treat every day as a gift, because days are fleeting and each day deserves some pizzazz.  He taught me to love writing, if only for the hope of transporting others, of making events somehow more real and permanent.  I was there.  He was there.  We were here. And he taught me that it is OK, possibly even encouraged me to be silly and light, because those will be the moments that stick like superglue to the brain after all: not the melancholy; not the selfish.  Some lessons took me longer to learn than others, but the important thing is: I finally listened and he finally taught me.

His name is Kevin.  He is my brother.  And though it has been thirty years since his passing, he is very much alive.  In me.  In my parents.  In his best friend: my brother, Chris.  In my brother’s children.  And soon, in mine.

We share almost the same birthday, separated by a few years and few hours.  Truth be told, I’ve always thought that the most special thing about me.  This was a boy so full of spirit; I could only hope to follow in his footsteps, to pick up the trail where he left off, to continue onward.  To make him proud.

If it seems odd to stay that we have a close relationship without meeting, that’s OK.  I suppose in the long run, it matters only to me.  I’ve grown because of it; like a sounding board I’ve spent years bouncing off ideas and moral quandaries upon him, hoping to get something back.  And I always do.  It’s more than my subconscious, I feel. 

There have been events that occur in my life that are otherwise unexplainable.  Sure, there is such a thing as random coincidence. But for every action there exists an opposite.  And there are times when believing in something outside ourselves is very, very necessary.  We are not walking puppet theatre to some unknown, but if we are very true and very genuine, there are answers.  Even when a situation seems to begets no rational answer.  They are there.  There are things that science can prove and there are things that science cannot prove.  Yet. In the long run the circular arguments don't much matter when you know. 

And so I’ve always known he was with me.  I’m a walking testament of that, I suppose.

Of course, the entirety of this post is incredibly selfish.  That’s a testimony to him, for I know that not only my whole family, but those that had the pleasure of meeting him just a few times could write tomes about the boy he was.  I am just one of the many in a long, long line.

So I send my grateful thanks the expansive universe.  And to the seven-year-old boy who made me who I am.  Someone I can only hope to meet, some day down the road.  May he rest in peace until then…

I love you, Kevin.

The Three-Legged Prairie Dog

Some day, while settling into a roomy leather chair across from a famous book reviewer clad from head to toe in tweed, he will lean forward in curious expectancy and eagerly ask, “Ms. Dolack, what exactly happened in your life to give you the power to write with such raw and searing emotional depth?’  He will pause, anticipatory, his words spoon-like in the air ready to consume my piping hot bowl of an answer as I lean back and allow a slow smile to spread across my face.  “Ahh,” I will respond.  “Well.”

Of course, this is what one calls a fantasy.  The more likely scenario will involve me sitting in a rusty wheelchair with colored pencils holding my thin grayed hair back in a bun as my great grandchildren whisper to one another, “Why is she so crazy? She’s creepy.  I think she might be dead.” Then they will shrug and take their futuristic wireless controllers and roll tiny metal cars with bizarre electrical chips over my feet, boney hills in the landscape of children’s toys. 

Either way, the questions both have the same answer. 

What makes my caged bird…so deranged?  To what can I trace the loss of my emotional innocence and stability? I’ll tell you.

It was the three-legged Prairie Dog. 

Also, probably everything related to Disney.

Growing up, I was something of a naturally sensitive child.  Before I even knew what the underdog was, I was rooting for her/him/it.  And life was fine with that, especially because life kept handing me the underdog and asking me to love it. 

I mean this in the most literal sense.  If there was a dog or another animal that Mama Nature had somehow separated from the litter for being, well, not one of the fittest, it found its way into my arms.  With every opportunity I spit in the face of Darwin, though unfortunately, Darwin occasionally won out.

For example, my friend Catherine recently pointed out that during one summer when we were particularly into reptiles, we had dually convinced our parents to purchase us newts.  Of course, I managed to pick the one with the bleeding, gaping wound on the top of its head.  I’m fairly certain the store owner tried to discourage me from buying it, but I was dead set on spending my seventy-five cents on THIS NEWT.  While I can’t remember how long the little bugger lived, I do recall that I named it Donny after one of the New Kids On the Block and much like Donny, it suffered from below normal intelligence, gyrating its hips only capture a fly dinner or I’d imagine, consider setting itself on fire and just ending it all.  Its head never did stop bleeding and it eventually succumbed to the continual blood loss regardless of how many bits of toilet paper I placed, yarmulke like, on top its visible skull.

Among my other pets, I had a goldfish named Jaws that spent the bulk of its life in a Groundhog Day cycle of swimming in circles and attempting to commit Hari Kari; a frog I tried to help escape into the real world by releasing it into our ‘fancy don’t touch’ living room; a rabbit that essentially had nothing wrong with it, so again I tried to release it into the wild, only sending my mother on a frantic dash through the woods behind our house shouting that a domesticated rabbit had no business trying to survive in the rough forest preserves of northern Illinois.  She turned out to be correct: the rabbit did eventually keel over from a heart attack after a coyote apparently got too close to his cage.  There was also a hamster that I creatively named ‘Muffin Cupcake,’ who died of an overdose of carob on Christmas Eve-though I still harbor suspicions that after the fiftieth time escaping from its cage and scampering through the nice furniture, my mother didn’t actually take out back and shoot square between the eyes with a potato gun.  

It was around the time of Muffin Cupcakes’ demise that my mother finally relented out of sheer pity (what she would later come to realize was a horrible mistake) by taking me to our local pet store.  Jungleland Pets wins the worst misnomer for any store as I would suggest that something along the lines of, ‘Mickey’s House of Hell” a more appropriate descriptor. Everything, and I mean everything about the shop was depressing.  Nestled between the Service Merchandise I once swore to have spied David Koresh post Waco and a decrepit Jewel food store, Jungleland Pets made the amenities of a touring circus appear lavish by comparison.  Truth be told, if the owner hasn’t been apprehended by authorities for the illegal transportation and breeding of rare animals by now, he most likely overdosed on poppers in the back of his ancient Buick LaSabre in a CostCo parking lot.

Upon entering the store, one was greeted with a foul tempered monkey who screamed at visitors and threw feces in the general direction of the counter.  Unlike most children who have a fascination with monkeys, I was not one of them.  After nerd-like engrossing myself in various Michael Crichton books and convincing myself that if I came too close to the monkey I would inevitably suffer some horrific fate whereby my skin would slowly melt off my face while boils took control over the rest of my body, I kept a safe distance.  That said, in hindsight if I were a monkey trapped in a cage in the middle of a strip mall in Nowheresville, Illinois, I’d probably throw my poop at people, too.  Just for the hell of it, at least.

A tertiary walk around the store revealed the standard array of pet shop wares: dogs of overpriced breeds, rat-like ferrets, fat gerbils, suicidal looking fish, large spiders and an oversized snake that I secretly hoped would one day bite the store’s proprietor directly in the face.  Yet on this particular visit, the store boasted an exotic and rare treasure: four or five prairie dogs.  Housed in a glass case that had probably recently held sewer rats, the prairie dogs tumbled and played among the woodchips.

“MOM!” I screamed  “I NEED THEM ALL!”  Understanding at even that young age that prairie dogs were social animals, (that I needed very badly to begin construction in the basement on plans I had recently mapped up on my chalk board to be something like a Prairie Dog Wally World) I knew the four or five needed to be kept together.  Surely, they weren’t selling them…separately?

I peered closer into the cage as one prairie dog meandered over to the glass that separated us and stood on its hind legs, awkwardly positioning its body against the divide.  Placing its paws to the glass like a tiny prison inmate absent a small black, phone, it beckoned me closer.  I aligned one hand with one paw, another hand with the....  And there it was, the prairie dog was missing a leg.   

Separated from the herd of its happy prancing peers, it seemed to look directly into my soul and telepathically whisper, “saave me.  Saaave me.”

Recognizing the crazed look that overtook my face, my mother quickly ushered me out of the store.  ‘They need to be together!’ I sobbed, and my mother, always the protector, promised me that they would indeed be sold together to someone who had the resources to actually build the prairie dog amusement park of my dreams. 

Which is why I’m not certain why I was allowed to go back to the store one week later.  Immediately rushing to the glass cage, I was horrified to discover that indeed the prairie dogs had been sold.  All but one.  My three legged friend sat alone in the corner, sighing. 

To do this day, I wonder had my mother agreed to purchase the prairie dog, my childhood attention span would have grown tired of the animal; its three legged allure worn off, my desire to save overtaken by my desire to for a new pet.  Probably not, and yet my sensitivity tripled. 

Disney movies no longer became enjoyable films with personified animals.  Instead, they morphed into gory nightmares: Bambi’s mother shot, Dumbo’s mother tortured?!   Mufasa brutally murdered.  Benji? Forget it.  Half way into the movie I had to be driven home since my sobbing was starting to bother the other children in the theatre.   Reading Where the Red Fern Grows was akin to water boarding; I honestly think I would have preferred to have my little cuticles slowly cut, toenails gradually lifted of my pinkie toes than read a book wherein the family pet is shot and buried.  And it wasn’t just Disney flicks that incited my animal sensitivity, but even an innocuous display: a stuffed animal sitting alone on a toy store shelf, for example.  While the average person sees exactly that, a stuffed animal, I saw a baby orphan, flies swarming around its face reaching out to me and whispering, ‘saaave me.’

I gave up eating pork of any kind for three years after watching the movie Babe, resuming again in college when I discovered that bacon was the miracle cure for hangovers. 

It wasn’t until I was older and long post college that I indulged the glory of the Internet and its valuable pet finding services.  Each weekend as I visited my parents, I lobbied for another adoptable pet, preferring of course those whose eyes had been gouged out, or necessitated a sort of amateur wheelchair to get around and the apex: any animal that had been shot or stabbed-bonus points if it required an amputation or a voice box.  

This is, of course, how I met the tiny love of my life, Gilda.  While researching disabled pets, I stumbled upon the  toothless wonder that is she and without hesitation drove the fifty miles, best friend in tow-check in hand, to pluck her from the cage that sat atop the kitchen table at a Doberman rescue.

But the addition of Gilda to my life did not quell my need to painstakingly research and torture myself with disabled pets; in fact it only enhanced it.

Once, while reading an article about an elderly dog that had gone blind and was looking for someone to love him before he ‘crossed the rainbow bridge,’ I broke down into such hysterics that one would have thought I just witnessed a brutal crime scene. 

Which makes this emotional affliction all the more bizarre; I will watch (indeed prefer) films that focus on intense gun shoot out action, serial killers, horrific blood and guts scenarios, but put me in a theatre where Toy Story is playing and one cartoon gets its feelings hurt, and I’m a goner. 

‘How is it that you can watch that stuff?’ my mother asks as I gleefully describe the latest episode of some crime drama, and I have no explanation.  Indeed, before bed when I can’t fall asleep, I will find the latest episode of 48 Hours Mystery and drift away to crime scene photographs.

Once, while working on a crime documentary at a factory production company of sorts long before Kurtis, I was chastised by a project manager for leaving out a bloody autopsy photograph while she was giving a tour.  Since I really rather didn’t like this woman, I took out two more and left them sitting at a desk opposite her office for a period of weeks, she unable to touch them because it was necessary for us to display them just so for the cameraman.  

Of course, had she been a Basset Hound expressing some distress, I would have hid the photographs immediately.

‘Don’t you have trouble falling asleep?’ I am often asked.  But the truth is, nothing puts me to sleep better than two detectives talking about a triple homicide.  My dreams don’t really seem to turn to nightmares either.  Just the other night after falling asleep to a particularly greedy crime caper about a husband suspected of killing his wife, I dreamed that Barbra Streisand and I were breaking into homes, not to steal anything, but just to peek around.

“What if we get caught?” Barbra nervously questioned.  “Oh Barbra,” I sighed with knowing authority, “You’re Barbra Streisand.  Who would call the police on you?” And together we laughed while prying through a middle-aged woman’s St. John suits.

Maybe I just gravitate more toward underdogs, especially those in the animal kingdom, because unlike your average person, they wish no harm: don’t make the same mistakes, don’t usually fall victim to greed or envy or anger of judgment.  They may be a little different, but they reach out to each and every one of us and seem to say, ‘love me.  Just because.’ 

Well, except for Cujo.  He was a jerk.

So it was recently after taking in a day at the beach, that my husband suggested we beat the heat and check out a new release at the theatre that my bizarre emotional affliction was revealed.  Knowing that the two of us have exhausted every available comedy (the only genre of film on which we can both agree), I am fully aware that he will suggest we see the new Pixar film.  I freeze.  It is though someone has walked up to a tiny child and suggested that ‘we watch this funny movie about clowns called It.’ After much convincing, I finally relent, but only after he promises that he will not balk when I order the large popcorn with extra butter.

As it were, after battling the lines to the theatre and finally finding my husband who has saved us seats, the lights dim and I hear Morgan Freeman’s voice.

This is OK.  I am OK, I breathe to myself at the same moment that I swear God itself decides to play an evil trick on me.  There splashed across the screen, a small child runs over to the beach where he tries frantically to pull plastic off a baby dolphin’s tail. 

‘You’ve got to be f@$#ing kidding me,’ I think out loud, much to the harsh stares of the parents of the four year old average demographic in the theatre. 

Morgan Freeman crosses the screen and places his hand on the boys’ shoulder, ‘Son,’ he says ruefully, ‘I think we’re going to have to cut it off,’ and gestures to the dolphin’s tail. 

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!

And what ensures is two minutes of pure torture in which Morgan Freeman and the boys father work together to form a prosthetic tail for the incapacitated dolphin who has been given one percent change of survival.

‘Don’t die, Snowball, don’t die,’ the boy sobs and I swear the child actor looks into the crowded theatre and winks at me like the Devil itself.

BASED ON A TRUE STORY! The script on the screen soullessly shouts.

Yeah, I’ll bet it is.  I’ll just bet.

My husband looks over at me and I am sobbing hysterically, methodically shoving huge handfuls of popcorn into my mouth like a temporary gag so as not to let out an audible whimper.  He thinks it is sweet, I know he does.  He thinks he’s married such a sweet woman, one so consumed by hypersensitive empathy that she cries over Morgan Freeman dolphin movies and cartoon cars that get their feelings hurt.

And it is fine.  I will let him think that for a while.

The truth is, I don’t think he quite understands the river that runs beneath the surface of my tears.  A river that winds and turns with scattered patterns, one that has caused me to be consistently drawn to the underdog to the point of insanity: placing vegetables on the shelf together so they don’t get lonely, scouring disabled pets well into the night as a murder mystery plays on my headphones, tirelessly rooting for the Cubs, just to name a few.

So I suppose some day when I am asked ‘how do you write with such empathy?,’ or ‘why are you so crazy, great grammie?,’ I will answer: it is because in so many ways for so many years, I have loved the three-legged prairie dog.  And it has taught me all I need to know.

It Feels Like a Remedy

There are moments in life where the incredible happens: when you receive something that you’ve only ever dared to wish for in the very quietest parts of your subconscious.   And even then, the thought is fleeting.

I used to crinkle my nose at the word, ‘settled,’ but of course I had the rare ability to shun settlement in pursuit of unsettling the world at large.  When you are young and have a home that brims with love in which you can always return, adventure is far less daunting.  Knowing that you can simply return to a place where your bedroom remains nearly untouched since high school days, where the same birds return every summer and gather in gossipy groups on the lawn, where with every Spring green vines snake up the side of the porch with an upward sisyphus-esque journey, fully aware that by the time the crisp Autumn air starts to sneak around the corners of brick walls their upward journey will promptly  reset for the following spring-well, it’s comforting.  It makes exploration less frightful and I am sure that Columbus and Magellan had a place they kept in a tiny treasure chest in their head, revisiting when the seas became stormy, the dark water stretching endless. 

Therefore, my time spent in Los Angeles-which now seems worlds away-felt much like one would imagine stepping into a television set, (if those 1980s music videos had made honest such travel possible).   There were perfectly oblong shaped pools; deep suits mingling with flipped flopped sunglassed boys on the same patio where Jayne Mansfield had once claimed a chaise.  There were elderly bellhops in legendary hotels who, recognizing the constant saucer plate eyes that give us recently relocated Midwestern girls away, had taken me aside and pointed out bathrooms where Marilyn Monroe had once stripped down to nothing and trounced out to the pool as though she were standing in her own, heavily fenced back yard.  There were late nights on strips and sunset was not a time of day, it was a place.  Palm trees tapped my windows to signal a rainfall and giant boulders took the place of benches on rocky beaches, where with my right hand placed visor like over my eyes, I would spend early mornings watching my friends as they crested over waves like seals.  During the days, I directed people I’d only seen through my television set to my various bosses' offices, asking, ‘would you like a water?’  Then returning to my desk as I tried to shake the fact that I had just spoken to real people and not cardboard cut outs come to life. 

I have sat on a rooftop of my friend’s hilltop house, drinking syrupy red wine while marveling at the brightly lit Hollywood sign to the left.  A deer grazed before us and my friend shuffled the pages of his latest novel.  The landscape looked as though God had opened up a pouch and scattered it with diamonds and the air was filled with opportunity that both intrigued and frightened me. I was swept into an impromptu tango across the wooden floors of Humphrey Bogart’s Wilshire home the same night I shared secrets with a West Hollywood Drag Queen.  Life was eccentric, and frankly, that eccentricity was the only thing that kept me afloat, made me feel comfortable- made me feel, somehow safe.  It is within that living, breathing bazaar that I felt at peace.  I was not alone.

But eventually my settled place called me back and I returned to Chicago.  My Dionysian life suddenly took a turn, as days and nights were spent behind desks, working among reporters, journalists, cameraman…. If there was a story to be covered, we would cover it.  But unlike Los Angeles, a city bathed in fantasy and fiction, these stories were all true.  High rises and hipsters, deadlines and the occasional drudgery.  I ran from relaxation about as quickly as I ran from men; one relationship to the next, each lasting only so long as the next commercial break. 

Too bold, probably naïve, I had an eye for danger and a need no different than eating or sleeping or breathing to prove myself capable of overcoming peril.  I dipped my toes in gang-swept waters and marched across mental and emotional plains of earth where the platelets below the surface constantly threatened to shift.  Ironically, I told myself that I was conquering my fears, proving myself unshakable, when in reality I was just using hazardous procrastination to avoid meeting up with my greatest fear of all: accepting myself enough not just to actually feel loved, but to give it back in return.

At that time, while standing in the middle of a ghetto known for it’s near constant drive-by shootings and grabbing on to a drug dealer by the collar of his shirt, warning him against ‘speaking to his mother that way,’ while teetering around in black stilettos like some off-kilter dandelion I felt oddly safer than, say, sitting down to a dinner in which red wine might  cause me to lower some of my defensive walls and just…be honest with who, exactly, I was.

I was called a workaholic many times, cold and sarcastic with too many nights felt ripped from the bindings of a Tennessee William’s play. 

But then there were the saving graces.  Friends.  But the word doesn’t seem to fully encapsulate the sentiment, so family.  Sitcom-esque in the perfection of our dialogue, in the lighting of the scenery, the staging, the action, and the eventual dénouement.

Without them, I struggle and struggled deeply.

Yet, now, as my bare toes scrape against the rough brick of my new porch, I call these memories to mind: coasts away from all those safety nets, watching as a third party as the home I once knew as my lighthouse among all these occasionally rough watered adventures is neatly packed and shipped away.  To another house up north of which I am fully unfamiliar. 

And I find myself here: smack in the middle of a heat wave in just about central Virginia.

How in the world did I get…here?

Allowing my mind to wander, I ponder this as I unsuccessfully attempt to coax my dog in from the one hundred degree heat of our back yard.

Before now, there were the urban porches and the Baz Lurman-esque landscapes, but today there is simple brick and the sound of a determined Bumblebee flitting past my head.  Even more odd, I find myself admitting that this place, this home, is that which I’ve always dreamed: those days in the hills, those nights in the office.

Here, wrought iron windows inlaid in wooden fences reveal overflowing gardens that lead to bricked patios and brightly colored umbrellas.  There is a lazy river that winds throughout town, old mills now converted into bistros and condos boasting river front views.  The only competition in the neighborhood exists between antiques stores.  There is even an old drug store with a soda fountain that delivers delicious Green Rivers, Black Cows, Root Beer. 

My days, once spent cramming in thirty seven hours of work in a twenty four hour period, are now spent on other pursuits: working with children in an adoption agency, writing, researching and occasionally padding down to the local library, a pre-Civil War mansion that stores books in every crevice, including the fireplaces. 

It is the kind of place where I imagine women find solace after traumatic events: the death of her husband, a divorce, an empty nest. Or where families flock, seeking character while trying to escape the confusion and cookie cutter streets of nearby Washington D.C. and its surrounding suburbs.

In the local bookstore, a gaggle of elderly men meet, all wearing hats that designate their time of service in one of America’s military branches.  Last week, local baker Mary Sue made brownies and they sat around the table discussing their book of the week, ‘How to Write a Sentence,’ by Stanley Fish. 

After the meeting, I ask two gentlemen if they enjoyed the book.  One wrinkles his face in knots and tells me it was superfluous, while the other, laughing, grabs at his chest and mimics falling backwards.  I find out that the former gentleman is a retired FBI Agent, the latter, a professor at our local university.  A jovial argument between the two breaks out and I realize that they still wear their former careers like the ranks emblazoned on their hats.

There are fresh vegetables and flowers to be purchased in the every day Farmer’s Market down the street.  I pick up some cucumbers and end up giving a few to my neighbor, ninety three year old Virginia Smith.  Who greets me, as she greets every one that comes to see her, ‘I’m just Virginia loving Virginia!’

But more importantly, there are hundreds, if not thousands of stories to be written here.  It is the type of town that begs a writer to discover, to settle in to one of her hundred year old houses, grab a typewriter and just release inky thoughts through his or her fingers. 

It is the ‘Some Day,’ wishful place: something I realized quite quickly after moving here from our old ramshackle hovel in Northern Virginia. 

Again, it is when I try to usher my Gilda dog in from the outside as she lies on her back and suns herself in a sliver of flashing white when all these thoughts above rush through my head like a tidal wave.  Gilda lifts her head, narrows her eyes, sighs, and then lowers herself to the ground once again.  I shrug my shoulders and smile, resigned to stay outside and watch her for a few more moments.  Just a few.  And yet, there’s something about the way her head drops against the cool of the brick that relaxes me and de-clutters my thoughts. 

It is amazing how life can give you exactly what you’ve needed and wanted for so long, even when you’ve pushed and resisted and tried unsuccessfully to run kicking and screaming in the other direction.

I lean my head back and let the sun wash over my face, imaging the freckles that will start to appear and spread across my cheeks in moments.  It feels like a remedy.

Settled can be a lovely feeling.