The Windshield and the Bug

This morning I was pretty mellow at school drop-off time. The Cloud of Jankdom seems to have lifted, at least momentarily, and I was feeling a little hopeful, a little energetic, like maybe I could make something of this day. My son, who sat beside me blasting Eminem at a decibel level that threatened the bolts on my Hyundai, was also happy-ish. Despite being grounded and having all of his mechanical life enhancements confiscated, he had actually borrowed someone else’s phone the previous day (his being in an unknown secure location) and texted me to say “how did the cooking go?” We liked each other. Life was good.

After he burst from the car in pursuit of someone named “Sippy,” binder in one hand, growth-stunting energy drink in the other (the sure hallmark of a neglectful parent) I noticed that the line was not moving. The line was not moving because one mom, very elegant in a calf-length shearling coat and high heels, had gotten out of her car to chat with the mom in the car behind her. In two-way traffic with the added complexity of influx and egress by means of a second entrance at right angles to the existing lanes, this kind of thing is Not Cool. It was the exact, last possible minute before students would be declared “tardy,” and because it’s freezing and icy, there was a larger than usual number of parent chauffeurs.

As we inched at a glacial pace around the oblivious creature, talking animatedly through her friend’s open window as if they were enjoying a stolen moment in Starbuck’s, I realized that I didn’t care. I also realized that, two days ago, I would have been livid. Harrassed by the brutal master of anxiety, I would have tapped my foot, rolled my eyes, and perhaps caught the eye of the oncoming driver and given an exaggerated shrug as if to say “go ahead; I’ll be sitting here forever while this moron talks about who’s picking the girls up from the swim meet.”

It also occurred to me that I have been that woman. There have been times when I saw the person I needed to talk to, knew I’d forget to make the call later in the day, and held up the line of cars to stop beside her’s for a moment, roll down my window and yell “I can’t make the meeting but I’ll bring the cookies before seven!” People undoubtedly wished fervently that I would be crushed by an errant piano.  I have also been the person on the short drive home who was going the exact speed limit and raising the blood pressure of twenty drivers behind me, and the person behind the maddeningly slow driver, driving up his or her automotive ass, using my car to express my frustration by sliding out to the far left of the lane as if to indicate my belief that there must be a horse cart in the road ahead, because surely there could be no other reason to drive so slowly.

It’s the cliché-est of clichés to say “perspective is everything.” Intellectually, we all know it to be true, but in practice, swaddled in our own finely woven blanket of emotions and temperament, it’s hard to see the impermanence of our current interpretations. In the words of Mary Chapin Carpenter, “Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.” On the whole, it’s more fun to be the windshield, but a bug with great karma can come back as Angelina Jolie…….

 

Janked, and Janked Again

Definition of janked :. (jăngkt) 1. (v.) The state of being beaten up, drunk, or in any way not of sound mind. Often describing something with a decisively negative connotation. 2. (adj.) Describing something as stupid or dumb. Often with a decisively negative connotation.

“Janked” is, and has for some time, been my favorite word. I use it often, to the dismay of my son who apparently wishes for a mother whose syntax more closely resembles that of Donna Reed to that of Kim Basinger in “Eight Mile.” I tell him fairly often that it is a highly useful descriptor, and that some things really are “janked.” Yesterday, for example, could serve as a third definition

The day began with a trip to see my doctor. I adore her; she is my age, smart, funny, and eminently sensible. None of this mitigated in any way the fact that my recent blood tests indicated a combination of blood sugar and cholesterol high enough to make the richest of pastries. As it turned out, the blood sugar thing was a fluke – I had swigged a gigantic glass of soda before heading out for a “fasting” blood draw, believing that it was Diet Sierra Mist. It was, in fact, the real deal, practically bursting with corn syrup and leading to my embarrassingly candied blood. What we could not laugh away was the cholesterol, mine by birthright and eating habits. I am old, I am collecting an assortment of pill bottles resembling that of an ancient crone, and I can no longer pretend that I am in the fair blush of youth.   Arriving home from the doctor’s office, I fought the nearly irresistible urge to eat a pound of bacon (so there, arterial plaque!) and took a phone call from my father. My mother was not well, and needed someone to sit with her while he went to a doctor’s appointment of his own. When I got to their house it was clear that she was wretchedly sick, and somewhat confused. With my father’s permission I called her primary physician’s office and spoke with a lovely human being who was willing to work around HPPA with me to the extent that she could tell me that if the patient was a woman who fit the exact profile of my mother, that hypothetical person might well be dehydrated, at the least, and should be taken to the Emergency Room for evaluation and care. Not unfamiliar with this drill, Dad and I worked as a team; he talked her into leaving her comfortable bed and going back to the world of sterility and invasion, and I helped her get dressed and into the car. This process took, literally, hours, and by the time I watched them drive off to the hospital, lump in my throat and theologically muddled prayers for protection in my heart, it was time to pick Sam up from school.

Waiting in front of the school, watching the last long-legged, bright-mittened stragglers hauling saxophones and book bags as they trudged across the tundra, my cell phone rang. “Mrs. Nichols?” said a vaguely familiar voice. “This is Mr. X, Sam’s algebra teacher? I have him here in the office, waiting to see the assistant principal.” First I thought about the fact that I had never had a chance to put on any makeup, having been engaged in someone or other’s medical issues since leaving the house at 9:00.  I had, possibly, the faint residue of black eyeliner on my upper lids and a few odd clumps of mascara, giving me the air of an aging prostitute with rather poor access to soap and water. He was still talking. “…made a rather strange comment. That’s what I’m really concerned about, here.”   “What sort of comment? To you, or to another student?” He hesitated.   “Well, not really either. Can I tell you what it was? I guess I can tell you what it was. You’re his parent.” I waited, faintly hopeful that this session of Guess the Infraction was coming to a close. “He said something about hurting himself.” This was not what I had expected. I know, of COURSE I know that many parents are oblivious to their children’s true mental state, particularly as they enter adolescence, but I am close to Sam, and could not imagine that the blithe spirit who thumps up and down the stairs singing Eminem songs off-key was harboring suicidal thoughts. But what if I’d read it all wrong? What if I was a terrible parent? The weight of the day, my increased physical dilapidation, my mother’s perpetual illness and despair, and my son’s possible secret misery brought swift, hot tears to my eyes.

“Well, I guess we need to talk about that” I submitted lamely.

“Oh I don’t think he meant it,” came the jovial, avuncular response. “I think he meant it as a joke. The thing is, you know, in my position as a teacher I can’t just ignore things like that. I’ll bring him out and remand him to you, if that’s okay.” Sam was successfully “remanded,” I made him apologize, and there was much helpless shrugging and smiling all around. It was weird. After we were in the car with the door closed, I sprung.

“What in God’s name were you-“

“I was kidding! He asked if we all understood this one thing, and I raised my hand and said I wasn’t sure, and he asked if there were other people who didn’t get it, and there were, so he said maybe we needed a little homework after all, to practice. So then I said ‘great, I’m going to kill myself now.’ You say stuff like that all the time.” He closed with a rhetorical flourish worthy of William F. Buckley.   “You’re right,” I said, “I do. You have to understand the position he’s in, though.”

“I do. Can we go to Walgreen’s?” We could. I needed chocolate.

Later that evening, after chocolate, a restless nap and a faint return of my usual joie de vivre, I walked, barefoot into my office to check my e-mail. Feeling something clinging to the bottom of my right foot, I reflexively dragged it across the top of my left foot to scrape it off. There was a moment of shocking agony, and I looked down to see a crimson line across my white flesh, already letting go enough of my (very fatty) blood to puddle on the hardwood. I had found the broken piece of glass from the beaker I broke.

Still later, after the cleaning and bandaging of the foot, the cleaning of the floor, the cursing of God and the phone call from the hospital to say that my mother was resting comfortably, but would have to be admitted, I decided the Day of the Jank-all was well and truly over. If I went to bed right then, barring natural disaster or untimely death, I would awaken the next day and start over.

This morning, the basement drain filled with raw sewage, and even our super-long snake couldn’t reach the obstruction. The plumber is here now, he can’t give us an estimate probably because the company’s liability policy doesn’t cover the deaths of customers who faint, hit their heads in their own basements and drown in sewage. My mother has called to ask why I haven’t been in to the hospital yet. My son has texted to ask if I can pick up a Little Caesar’s pizza and take it in at lunchtime.

I am thinking of a new word now, one that may resonate with everyone who is living life on a daily basis: Rejanked.

The Key to a Happy Life

Happy families lose their keys; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but can undoubtedly locate a front door key with little difficulty.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Chapter 1, first line

 

Last Friday night, we needed a key to our house. Most, if not all of you, probably have such a key and could locate it in a matter of seconds. “Why,” you might say, astonished at such a ridiculous query, “it’s on my key ring in my purse! Where else would it be?” Those of you given to athletic feats of organization might also be able to cite the location of duplicate keys at the homes of trusted neighbors and friends, under a potted plant near the front porch, or hung neatly on some sort of pegboard or set of hooks, shining rigidly in the hopes of future deployment. Here, among the savages, there is no such certainty.

We needed a key because, for my son’s fourteenth birthday party, we elected to use my husband’s hotel “points” to get two rooms at a nearby Comfort Inn. One was for six boys to stay up all night playing Call of Duty, eating Cheetos, drinking Mountain Dew and calling girls on their cell phones. The other (adjoining, of course) gave us a base from which to monitor them through the connecting door and utter variations on “keep it down” approximately 7,000 times between 7:00PM and 11:00AM. Although we knew we could easily dispatch one adult back to the house to feed and walk our dogs, it occurred to us that we should probably lock the house between those visits. Again, those of you leading traditional lives are widening your eyes and thinking, “well of COURSE you have to lock your house! Don’t you lock it every time you leave?”

The answer is pretty much that we do not. When we moved into this house eleven years ago, the inspector told us that the beautiful, original 1912 front door with its gracious woodwork and central pane of glass would make it incredibly easy to break in. “Replace it,” he said, “or get a big dog.” I wanted the door, and I always want dogs, so the next time Rob left for a work trip I repaired immediately to the Humane Society where I adopted not only the dog I had seen in the newspaper and intended to add to the family, but the rambunctious beagle-terrier mix who seemed so improbably happy to see Sam and me looking through the bars of his cage. Problem solved: we had two dogs, one biggish and one small, both loud enough to scare the living daylights out of anyone foolish enough to attempt to burgle our house.

Between the dogs and the fact that all of our neighbors are undergraduates who are awake (and often outside smoking various things) at all hours, we felt fine with our policy of leaving the house unlocked when we went to the grocery store, or out to dinner. We didn’t travel much, as a family, and when we did leave for longer than twelve hours we had to hire someone to take care of the animals, and we gave that person a house key. Because at one time, we had some house keys. I had one on my key chain, Rob and Sam each had one, and several were disbursed to reliable pet-sitter types who either kept them between times, or left them in the mailbox for us so that we could return them to the neat row of hooks next to the door.

I don’t know what happened, it was some sort of incremental Loss of Key Consciousness, but by Friday, when it occurred to us that one dog was stone deaf and the other was likely to be sleeping under the covers upstairs when the intruder smashed the door in, there were no keys. My key had fallen off the gigantic key ring I carry, which features a bead, which unscrews to “open” the ring to admit new keys. Unfortunately, it unscrews at inopportune moments, and some time in November it disgorged everything but my work keys and my car key into a snow bank at the edge of the mall parking lot. I think. Sam’s key, along with his entire key ring was confiscated by his gym teacher because of his refusal to “dress out” for class, whatever that means. (If it were “dress up,” I would care, but “dressing out” sounds really aggressive and gym-teacherish). There were no keys on the hooks by the door. I started calling everyone to whom we had ever given a house key, realized that more than half of them now lived in other states, and gave up. Desperate, I even called my father who organizes his saw blades by diameter and his handkerchiefs by whiteness, and asked if we had ever given my parents a key. “You don’t have a key to your own house?” he asked, incredulous. “You won’t even be able to get copies made if you can’t find at least one.”

Defeated, slatternly, courting danger, we left the house unlocked, took the boys to an R –rated movie, and carted them off to terrorize small children at the hotel pool before eating toxic junk food. Around 11:30, as I lay on the King-sized bed watching “Criminal Minds,” Rob returned from the dog walking mission. As he took his coat off, I told him I was kind of worried about leaving the house open all night.

“Oh, it’s locked” he said as he picked through the melting ice and unwrapped a plastic cup. “I found a house key on my key ring. I didn’t think to look there.”

That key is the seed, the hard, glittering embodiment of promise that some day, somehow, we will grow a new crop of keys, place them confidently, proudly cite their respective locations, and be Proactive towards life. After my nap.

 

 

 

 

A Toe in the Water?

When I wrote a month or so ago about “not writing a book,” I got  such good advice. The most useful, I think, was the notion that if one does not have a passionate and burning desire to write a book, if one is not literallypossessed by an idea, it isn’t the right time. I’m sure there are exceptions if one churns out something formulaic, or has a contract to write the next book in an existing series, but neither of those scenarios fits my fledgling novelist status. I am starting fresh, my regrettably unpainted toenail inching towards the shark-infested waters.

So this morning, I had an idea. I knew it was a good one because I felt that whoosh of intense feeling, a heedless rush like a sip of brandy doing its fine work as I fought to maintain control and make order in my head. The fact that I couldn’t stop it, and that it lit me up without my consent and refused to be categorized, organized or otherwise domesticated was a sign that I was in the presence of a power outside my prim, intellectual garden. This was passion. This was it. (I think).

My first impulse was to blog about the general topic of the book. Just a sample, mind you, not the whole thing. I wanted approval, some kind of green light, thumbs-up, attention, encouragement and validation. The need for a pat on the head and a word of praise has always been my drug of choice. I thought maybe I would just write a little post, just to see if people liked it. I started to write, I was in the proverbial groove, and a voice (Moses? God? Barry White?) said “don’t spill it!” Seriously. I was just sitting at my desk typing and I heard a voice warning me that if I didn’t hold my vision close and let it grow, I would surely be letting it die of exposure. I had to protect my vision from my neurosis, which is harder work than a sane person might think.

Then there was this whole other issue about the autobiographical nature of my idea. Without a doubt, real live people would see themselves in my writing, or, worse yet, think that they did. Would I have to change everything to the point where it was no longer really the story I wanted to tell? Would I have to contact all living players and let them know my plans? Could I become ruthless and uninhibited, writing what I needed to write despite the ghost chorus in my head wailing “but you made it look like I…?” I have nothing awful to say about anybody, honestly, but I know that any version of life coming from my own experience will necessarily conflict with the memories and perceptions of other people.

I know I should just write the damned thing. Five hundred pages a day, an hour a day, some kind of reasonable, disciplined schedule for cranking it out without diluting it by writing blog posts or gutting it by trying to avoid hurt feelings. I am looking at my toe nervously, wondering if just a quick coat of blue sparkly polish would hasten the movement of sharks towards my sheltered area of the shore.