My First Short Story Publication

That's right- I'm officially a published author!

My short story, What the Tree Saw, won a contest and is printed in the Pooled Ink Anthology of other poem, essay and short story winners.  And a little fist pump for me- I'm even mentioned on the back cover!
Yep, pretty excited!

click on this link to how to purchase your copy through Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Pooled-Ink-Celebrating-Contest-Winners/dp/1493662856/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1398878677&sr=1-1&keywords=pooled+ink

What the Tree Saw

 

What the Tree Saw   

(Winner- 2013 NCW short fiction contest) To be published this Fall in a collection of short stories.                                  

          Now it’s common knowledge that a town of a certain size will have a witch, if only for the purpose of eating disobedient children and thereby keeping the population at manageable levels. My grandma said that mothers of naughty boys and girls offered up more prayers on behalf of their offspring than mothers of obedient kids. To keep down the praying, witches started eating up the troublemakers who were giving their mothers extra reason for heavenly correspondence.
         “Didn’t their Mamas pray even more when their kids were et up?” I’d ask. Sometimes I’d get as much as a huff out of her, but mostly her answer’d be that their mothers forgot about them quicker than a girl my age would care to dwell on.

          I believed her, because my grandma was one of those witches.

          She lived at the edge of town—the edge of town that seemed to be downhill or at least downstream for where the wind would pile up the worst looking dead leaves—in a large grey house that backed up to the only creek in the county. That house had stood through the war. Rumor had it that a Yankee general had tried to burn it, but it wouldn’t light. He tried again and half an oak tree fell on him and his horse and smashed him dead for his effort. The part of the story that most people left out, cause it made the house and the town a whole lot less special, was that this general was burning houses in the middle of a near monsoon. It was too wet to burn a can of gas. The storm and some wind knocked that branch down on his head. Nothing more than bad luck.

            It was at the base of that very tree that my friends and I congregated today. The weeds grew high in the yards around us so we were free from the watchful eyes of adults. We’d been hunting toads all morning along the banks of the drainage ditch that ran behind the house, and once again, the sun had gotten high without us even sighting a single one. We slumped in the shade. There were five of us: me; Ray; the Treemont brothers, Finn and Buck; and my little brother, William. I was the newest to the gang and Will didn’t even count he was so little, so we were getting the least amounts of shade, but not complaining.

           ***********************
Thank you for reading! I've taken down the rest of the story because toward year's end it will be published in an anthology.  Send me a note if you'd like to be emailed about how to get a copy. I'll keep putting up new stories. Thanks again!

Everything on this site is copyrighted. Do not reproduce for financial gain and do not repost without giving credit to author.

Buying My First Bra

         

 My grandma bought me my first bra.  Now if you ask my mother, she’ll shake her head and swear that she was the one who held my hand as she ushered me through this most sacred of entry doors to womanhood.  But she’d be wrong.  She brought me on my first bra shopping trip sure enough, but our hunt that day was unfruitful. And that’s when grandma came to visit.

            Looking back, I’m pretty sure Grandma’s impending visit was the reason Mom suddenly took an interest in my support wear- not that I had suddenly developed anything that necessitated underclothing - but because grandma was crazy. I know as you read this that many of you are smiling, nodding and recalling your own wacky relations.  (it bonds us; makes us similar and I appreciate that- it’s helpful when sharing embarrassing stories of puberty- but it also lessens the crazy that this woman wore like stolen boy scout pants*.)  

            “There’s a garage sale in your neighborhood.”  Grandma grinned at my sister and me as she poured the milk.

             We were both eager to go. We wolfed down our breakfasts and grabbed up our few dollars and shoved them into whatever purse was the latest one that grandma had given us. Both of these facts were important because Grandma hated greedy kids and she hated even more, ungrateful ones but she also seemed to feel a sense of loss if none were to be found and so she was quite skilled at making my sister and me fit the bill, and we in turn, wore lots of hair clips fashioned out of neon shoelaces.

          Garage saling with Grandma usually guaranteed a happy day. If we could pack in a few sales every day it an ensured an entire visit of relative peace. Here we were, only a few hours into the morning and already on our way to hunt bargains—it bode well for this visit and we could all sense it as we tromped out the front door with high spirits. I know my step faltered a bit, when we –my sister and I decked out in some god-awful Christmas sweaters that we’d just been gifted from the Ropa Usada-- realized that the sale we were heading for was not just ‘in the neighborhood’ but directly across the street. As in, we knew these people. I babysat for their kids, borrowed cups of sugar from them, just generally wanted to keep that certain respect that’s usually cultivated between neighbors that never trade nickels for worn-out socks. 

         My sister was younger and therefore had been embarrassed less by grandma’s voracious bargain hunting (like how the second deer brought down by a pack of wolves knew a tid bit less about being chewed on than the first) but even she hung back and together, the two of us dawdled our way across the street until we no longer could avoid being within the perimeters of the sale. We slouched near the “free” bin nearly in the road, not touching anything, definitely not looking at anything, in the vain attempt to make it appear that we’d just donned these sweaters and large old-lady satchels for a casual August morning walk and had only paused here because we were in the area.

                Mom and Grandma didn’t notice our reticence and set to work seeking treasures. In a matter of minutes, Katie and I were joined by quite a few other kids that we knew from school. Most of them were my age and looked just as horrified to be spotted as we were. Somehow, their misery made me feel loads better. I was, at least, used to this kind of Saturday. If the world suddenly ended and we few embarrassed teenagers at the curb were all that was left, then I would be likely be nominated as the leader for my knowledge and adeptness for the situation.

          I felt that we instantly became closer friends as we all kept our backs to the cardboard boxes of bargains and maniacally pretended that we weren’t standing at the base of a garage sale while our parents shopped. The cute boy that always sat in the back of the school bus and that I’d never had the guts to talk to even directed a chin lift greeting my way. And there, in the sunshiney day of summer and childhood and innocence I chose to ignore that it was probably my sweater that made him notice me. Today, we were all comrades ignoring our silly parents and nothing could find a chink in that armor.

           “Jennifer! Get in here,” Grandma called me up to where the Buick was parked and tables were piled with clothes. I could hear my peers snickering, grateful that the gods of the garage hadn’t chosen them as the next victim. That was fine. I’d been through my fair share of embarrassing moments and really what could a table of suburban housewife clothes have that was worse than what I was already wearing? I should have noticed when my mom wouldn’t make eye contact with me.        
             But Grandma sure did.
             For about 2 seconds before her focus dropped to my chest. 

             “Jennifer, they’ve got bras. Try this on.”
             “Grandma...” I looked to my mom to back me up here while I mentally scrambled, “we actually just had this discussion just yesterday- with real professionals, even- and I’m good.” 

            “If you’re not going to try it on, then I will.” Grandma growled.  (She wasn’t talking about putting it on her own body- she was meaning that if I wouldn’t do it willingly, then she would get it on me unwillingly.
          My panic latched onto something that might slow her. “A whole dollar a piece. That’s salty.” And I backed away. But I didn’t get far. 

             “If you’re gonna be a baby about it, then we’ll just try it on over top of the sweater.” Grandma had the neighbor lady’s ragged nursing bra up over my arms with a speed that would have stunned a seasoned cat bather. Then my mom got to work at my back girdling up all the extra wool that my ridiculous modesty had put between me and the perfect fit.

            The two of them mashed and tugged and worked in horrific harmony to take me through several bra fittings all under the stunned audience of neighborhood kids and passersby. We tried on a whole box of them suckers. I went home with quite a few and all it cost was a few dollars and a lot of dignity that I really didn’t need anyway.

---

*In truth, grandma never wore these pants that I mention- she gave them to me as a birthday present. They were huge and how she wrested them from the grip of the scout, I’ll never know, but when I wore them to school, oblivious in my brotherless life to all things scout, my friends were quick to inform me that somewhere in the world there was a naked boy scout holding up his three fingers and cursing my name.

 Everything on this site is copyrighted. Do not reproduce for financial gain and do not repost without giving credit to author.

Don't Feed The Bums

This little story got an honorable mention in the 2013 Delizon Short story contest and will be published this Fall.
 

      The first real house that my husband and I bought was in Albany, New York. Deep in downtown, like I could see the capital from our window. City buses, taxis, singing whinos, cracked concrete sidewalks, graffiti, all of those things you associate with city living we had in spades. This story is about one of those middle things- the singing whinos.

       We’d moved to New York for my husband to start medical school. I’d landed a job at the Jewish Community Center and the pittance they’d be paying me would be what we’d live on for the next four years. But the stars of my poor pay and the depressed housing market of the area aligned and on our first day there, we opened the realtors'  Housing For Sale page to a ray of heavenly sun and a section entitled: “Under $5,000”.

     There were homes- entire homes with bathrooms, roofs, walls, stairways, and carpet complete with quaint cigarette burns- for less than the cost of a car.  (Not any car that we could afford at the time, but still, that’s the perspective we framed these treasures in.) That first night in town, before we’d even gone out with a realtor, Chuck and I sat up late picking out our favorites and giggling about how we could go totally Daddy Warbucks on this town and buy two.

            Then dawn came and with it, actual physical visits to meth houses and the reality of a realtor that wouldn’t even get out of his car in the neighborhoods we requested, asbestos waivers to sign and crime tape to duck under.  It was a fun-filled week but in the end, self preservation wrung a few more dimes out of our tightwad paws and we sprang for a $30,000 house in a neighborhood that the local cops gave a shoulder-shrug rating of what we interpreted to mean, “so-so.”

            It was a two story brick row house the color of burnt chocolate and I swear to you in a most ardent fashion, that it was love at first sight. There’s really no other way to explain why I would have fought to buy it. It had been abandoned for 30 years. No water, no electricity, a few radiators remained but all of them had long ago exploded leaving the walls pitted with shrapnel and sprayed with what I first assumed to be blood (again, I’d been on the home tour of Dante’s Inferno for a solid week and this wasn’t even remotely a deal breaker) but what I later learned was heating oil. We couldn’t even walk down the main hallway on our initial visit because the lead paint was peeling in such thick massive curls that it truly resembled a gauntlet. There was no kitchen and where the bathroom should have been there was just a massive sagging hole where the roof had leaked, the bathtub had overflowed (for decades!) and finally the floor had just given up and fallen through. I took my first peek into the abyss where the bath should have been and there, 14 feet down, was a Volkswagen Beetle crushed by a toilet. And my thought was not to run, but to rush and put in a bid on this house before the seller realized they’d forgotten their car.

    I should have just titled this thing, “Being greedy and my weighty lessons in Karma”. We bought the house and a month later, moved in. Maybe someday I'll write a book about all the adventures surrounding that address, but for now I’ll just share the story of my first day as mistress of 77 Spring Street.

      On our initial day of home ownership, Chuck had medical school orientation so I was to go and get our place move-in ready on my own. Our realtor gave me keys to our new home, but those slacker pieces of metal were about to get fired when I realized what a crap job they’d been doing for the past few decades. As I opened my door for the first time I was greeted by half a dozen bleary-eyed men who I’d evidently awoken.  (The sleeping bags and their yelling is what tipped me off.) I think I went out and cried for a bit and then, realizing I didn’t have a whole lot of options, re-entered my home and tried again. This second time they were actually very nice and after the initial awkwardness of kicking them out, they seemed to understand that I had just bought the house and would not want them creeping in through the broken windows anymore.

            While I moved in my broom and box of black trash bags, the bums gathered their meager supplies, waved good-bye, and each seemed to take a different exit from the house-- kitchen window, rear window, porch fire escape, through useless back door and the last one, by shoving out the doorknob (and then kindly replacing it) of the door I was holding the keys for. It was like watching one of those night vision videos an exterminator would make to show you all the ways the mice are breaching your home. Well, my fortress was definitely not a secure one, but as the last bum wished me well, I was now mistress of my first home.

            The broom and trash bags- I mention them because they illustrate that even as I took up residence in this house-- even after I’d signed on the dotted line and mentally committed to potentially raise children in this husk of a home-- that I didn’t comprehend what I’d gotten into. I’d just evicted vagrants that spoke as if they’d been there for generations. I will tell you right now, that structure didn’t reach a broom and trash bag level of cleanliness until months later. On that first morning, I made a circuit of my new hellhole while dragging those naïve supplies. I don’t think I’d even made it to the sans kitchen before I pitched those futile tools into a corner, bought myself a snow shovel and work gloves and hired a dumpster to be delivered every week.

            Needless to say, that first day was a doozy. Luckily, Chuck and I hadn’t been sure that we’d be able to get a key to get into the place on the first day (yeah, I find it funny to realize that any sketchy guy on the street probably could have shown me how to get into the house), so we'd gotten a hotel room for the night. We met up that evening- me filthy and rushing to the first running water I’d seen all day, and him, shell shocked as a flag boy after hearing how med school intended to crush his soul- and we planned our attack on the next day.  The hole in the bathroom floor was bigger--well, it was the whole bathroom floor and fixing that would be first on the agenda.

            The next morning when we pulled up to our house, my bums were sitting on the front stoop. I think they assumed that I wouldn’t come back. If I had to guess/translate their silent gawks, my money would be on: “What she doing back? Who’d choose to live here? Slappy didn’t even stay a night before he went back to sleeping under the bridge. I mean, man, I claim no address before I’d admit to this place.” They shuffled off but not before I tried to introduce myself. In a way, they were my first neighbors and I was sort of new at all this, but I was eager for some friends.

            Those thoughts stuck with me for the rest of the beastly, heinous workday. Have you ever pulled a rotting toilet off of a rotting Volkswagen? Have you ever been near ceramic so fouled that it actually rotted? I blame my wandering mind on those surroundings. I got to thinking that the homeless men weren’t just sort of like my neighbors; they were actually my neighbors. The one who seemed the most sober had mentioned that they’d see me again tomorrow. One of the least sober ones had explained that our address is where they met every morning. I got a little thrill at hearing my house being described in the framework of being a community hub of sorts. A gathering place.

            I pictured me being one with the people of Albany; fist bumps and jokes and them helping me carry in my groceries and me getting them to give up drinking as we had evening talks on lawn chairs near the cobblestone street. I decided that I better get all these future relationships started on the right foot. The third morning, though we had ZERO money and I’d eaten nothing but potatoes for weeks, I blew a portion of our renovation budget on McDonald’s breakfasts for the seven neighbors that I expected on my front stoop.

            Morning came and so did seven of my friends. They gratefully took the breakfasts and more grunted than chatted with me as they wolfed down the egg McMuffins. I didn’t want to push the relationship too fast, so I excused myself to work on boarding up one of the upper windows. It didn’t take me long—a mere 48 hours in that house had trained me to be pretty good at boarding up openings-- so I was gone maybe 10 minutes before I returned to check on my guests.

            When I walked out onto my front steps, I was greeted with more vomit than I’ve ever seen in my life. You could work at a vomit store and never witness the volume that I saw. The bums were long gone, but they had left enough puke enough that it literally rolled down the sidewalk. 

      This was the moment I became a city girl.

      The crime scene tape, the pitbulls, the broken car glass on the sidewalks, the hair weaves sold at the grocery store, none of it made me cynical because I truly believed that I could find a silver lining in all of it. But in that moment of putrid reality, of realizing that I owned no garden hose and even if I did, that had no water to turn on anyway and that I had zero ways to spray that filth off my doorstep --in that moment, I would have used my worthless house keys to stab the next drunken bum that tried to “attend their daily meeting”.

     That morning I became a student at the school of cold hard facts:

       You feed a drunk homeless man a greasy breakfast and they’re going to puke it up all over your front steps. And there ain’t no silver lining to that.

Everything on this site is copyrighted. Do not reproduce for financial gain and do not repost without giving credit to author.

Rudy the Cat

My sister begged for a cat for years—and let me tell all the kids out there within view of my font- it is an effective method for getting what you want. When she was nine years old, our parents took us to the cat store. (You’ll recognize the exact same one playing “The Pound” in those Sarah Mclachlan commercials). Katie climbed into the kitten pen and picked out her dream kitty, a smoke colored little cuddler that she named Rudolph Valentino for his affectionate nature. She adored that kitten. And if it’s true what they say about babies growing from love, then this would have become one enormous cat. I can tell you definitively that this wisdom does not apply to felines.  This cat was loved to max capacity and at that point a switch was flipped, it was like his reservoir for affection tipped out all over the floor till he was bone dry. He became that member of the family that you were glad couldn’t reach the knife drawer and that you didn’t mention to your friends, but was also scary enough to grab that he wasn’t easy to keep hidden and they had to be pretty good friends for you to risk your own hide for their comfort and if they were that good of friends, shouldn’t they accept you for your man-eating cat?

            As frequently as Rudy bit us, I’d be prouder to say that it only took me a few weeks before I learned to give him a wide berth. But nope. It was a rare blood-letting that I would have the thought of, “Duh, should have seen that one coming.” I always remember being taken by total surprise that this creature the color of a dust bunny could be so full of teeth. By the time Rudy was full-grown, and knew our routines, he’d become the feline version of the cranky old lady at the end of the street. The one you knew was a witch that lived on human suffering. Just imagine that lady with pinty teeth, and she lurked in the shadows beneath your couch, enjoyed the flavor of kid flesh and the law couldn’t touch her.

            Rudy was actually my cure for fearing any kind of monster under the bed. As tough as I must appear to you nowadays, that was actually my “thing”.  I couldn’t watch Jaws without leaping the entire carpeted expanse of my bedroom because of the absolute surety that I was in some shark’s crosshairs. Once we adopted Rudy, I didn’t have to wonder what kind of monster was going to chew on me, it was only a question of when. Putting a face to the beast, parents, works better than any hug.  This motherly wisdom came later, though. As a ten year old, I trusted in evolution. Monsters had avoided detection for years because they were efficient and logical creatures (who hadn’t been tragically over-loved past the tipping point to evil like my cat). These noble beasts wouldn’t waste energy losing a turf war to my kitty amid the lost socks and board game pieces of my under-bed when there were way easier pickings at any other house.

            Do you know those nature shows where the lions lurk in the grass near the watering hole because they know the antelope will come? The family room sofa divided the kitchen from the TV room and you had to pass it to get to the front door. It was smack dab in the trifecta of places that kids needed to get. So that’s where Rudy would wait.

 

            Rudy had a few different methods for being a bad pet. Number 1: He would bite us. Number 2: He would chase us down the hall and spring onto the back of our legs, wrapping his sinewy kitty arms around a calf like he was climbing a palm tree, ten nasty claws would secure his hold and then he would kick with his back legs in a furious race against time and epidermis. You know how for some people, the smell of freshly cut grass or barbecue brings them back to their childhood? Blood-curdling screams of surprise do it for me. Number 3: He would lure us in and then do both. Now you can dismiss the next lines of my story as the confused ramblings of an old man, because if I hadn’t seen it myself, I wouldn’t believe a kitty could be so conniving. Now, cats are fast, much faster than pudgy little girls, so he could have chased me down and chewed on me anytime he wished, but when Rudy was feeling especially cruel he would purr and be cute. He’d trick us into coming to him. Lucky for us, Rudy was a poor actor. When he was faking, his purr was too high-pitched and his nostrils would flare and his eyes turned blacker.

As rotten as he was, he was also endlessly entertaining. Katie and I would dare each other to dash past him. We’d risk his lashings and dress him up in cabbage patch clothes and we had an entire ranking system for his attacks like, from under the couch hurt less than from the back of it and--especially on days when your hemoglobin was low—being bit was better than being clawed.

One day, my mom had decided it was high time that we got family portraits taken. She dressed up my sister and I to look alike and then set to work making our hair look absolutely like it never looked in real life. When she finished her work on us, she started in on herself and Katie and I were commanded to, “Sit still! Don’t get wrinkled! And don’t even think of touching that perm that I just molded into the perfect triangle!”

            Katie and I plunked down on the sofa to wait. Rudy was there and he began to purr.  One glance told me it was no good. But Katie was distracted, maybe telling me about her day or something, and sort of nonchalantly like she petted cats everyday (which she didn’t! because I’d have noticed the bloody stumps that suddenly replaced her hands).  Maybe she saw my face, or the way I instinctively tensed up when she began stroking him, or maybe she too heard that moment that Rudy stopped purring and that cat version of a villain’s hehehe began.

            Katie let out this little, “Oh…” and pulled back her arm slowly, like maybe he wouldn’t notice.

There was a split second of eerie stillness where Rudy’s eyes, black and shiny like a doll’s eyes, rolled white and in that next moment, he went Old-Yeller-in-the-corn-crib crazy. He rose up on his hind legs like a bear, sort of slow like and launched himself at her head –sprang onto her hair and clung like some sort of hideous cat-hide hat. She screamed and Rudy yowled. Katie started running—for  what, I’ll never know—but she ran like her head was on fire, and that cat, with his hackles up and tail exploded and gripping her scalp like he was taking down a grizzly bear—well, he looked like a grey flame.

She disengaged him from her hair, but he wasn’t ready to give up and slid his way, spitting and clawing all the way down her back. Their gruesome dance ended when Katie finally managed to pry him off the rear of her skirt.

Katie straightened up, breathing like a runner after a hill and her hands went to her mangled hair. Lots of it came out in her fingers and she sort of just patted it back into place. She looked like she’d just crawled through the paper shredder. Her little hands, crisscrossed in angry pink welts went to the tattered remains of her dress. She let out the kid version of a string of blue curse words where the swearing is done all with the eyes and in the tone: “Oh, no. Do you think Mom’ll be mad?”

           

To my mother’s credit, she wasn’t mad. She dabbed up the blood, fixed up Katie to look fine from the front and we went and took those pictures. To this day they’re some of my favorites because I know why my sister’s hair looks lopsided and I know why she’s sitting in every photo.

More house stories coming soon.  I just entered a few essay contests and some of them won't let me post my entries, so cross your fingers for me!  Or, if you're feeling selfish, don't cross your fingers and then I won't win and then I'll be able to put every story up here all the sooner.

Dog story for not quite kids, but not grown-ups

I wrote a story. Really don't know if it's any good, but how I love the look of black inky squiggles on illuminated white screen. And how I love dogs. 

The Peculiar Case of the Extra Dog in the Yard

There’s nothing like watching a dog play in the glow of the afternoon sun. Nothing more relaxing and at the same time, nothing more exhilarating. My office window faced the fenced in backyard and my desk was shoved up as close to that window as I could manage without mashing Maryann’s drapes. Grey raw silk. Sure it was distracting, my eyes would inch their way toward the green turf and overgrown arborvitae when I should’ve been staring at the lines of code on the computer screen. Minutes would pass, portions of hours would pass as I watched the dogs on pleasant days. When I’d catch sight of the clock and realize how much time I’d just wasted, I’d grimace and make a quick mental promise that I wouldn’t be so lazy again. But again would revisit so very quickly.

I was an adult, I had a job, a computer full of numbers, a boss, rules, structured time. I had a mortgage, a girlfriend who more and more frequently brought up the fact that I should propose and I had two dogs with enormous appetites who ate enormous amounts of kibble costing enormous dollars and giving me nothing but enormous mounds of stinking turds in return. I shouldn’t be staring out the window and I knew it. But as Chevy would charge at an unseen, floating attacker, snap in the air, body torqueing unpredictably, I swear my breathing would change; my heart would speed to a gallop and it was like I was right there with him.

And I guess that’s where it all started.

Chapter 1

“Did you pay the American Express?” She asked while kicking the fridge door shut.

I nodded but Maryann didn’t see because she was already simultaneously opening a new bag of cereal, checking the charge on her phone and shifting the bowl and spoon assembly line for cereal creation down the kitchen counter toward the carton of milk final stop.

 “Brian.” She managed to infuse my name with exhaustion. “We go through this every month…” As I said, she never saw me nod, didn’t know I paid the bill and, completely justifiably, seeing that in our 2 year relationship I had never paid the bill- she assumed that the American Express guys still needed money.

  “If we don’t pay by the 3rd, then our bank balance isn’t accurate and flamingos grow nose hairs that have to be dealt with.” Well, I made up the last part. You see, I tend to fade out about ten words into any scolding and at this point, her voice was having to travel through great shovel sized spoonfuls of cocoa puff and milk mountain breakfast, so was garbled enough that I was having to guess anyway.

“Sweetie. I paid it.”

My toast popped and Maryann swiftly flipped it onto a plate and handed me the tub of butter. She grinned. For anyone that didn’t know her well, it would look like the classic human expression of happiness. The upward curving of her lips didn’t reach her blue eyes.

“Alright then. Well, I’m gonna be late.” And with that she rose from the table with her purse. She set both her bowl and my plate on the floor between the legs of bent wood kitchen chairs. There was a scramble of dog toenails on linoleum and the sighs of two big dogs unwinding themselves from a too-tight spot beneath a kitchen table and lunging for food morsels. Morsels was a generous word, there was a quarter drip of chocolatified milk spread like a film against the glaze of the bowl and a toast crumb on my plate that was immediately inhaled before Bongo’s tongue even touched porcelain.

Bongo coughed.

 “Down the wrong pipe, eh boy? You can’t snort when it’s just crumbs. You didn’t even eat that one, you just breathed it up.”

 Two thick tails thumped. Both dogs seemed to smile up at me.

“See you at 5,” Maryann hollered from the doorway and we exchanged blown-air kisses.

The door shut and both dogs seemed to smile wider. One, two, three, four, five. Car door slam and engine rev. I grinned back at my boys.

“Wanna go for a walk?”

And there- that moment- was the best part of my day.

            Eight legs would churn, getting nowhere but struggling for the wall where the leashes were kept. Snap, snap and the churning limbs would make a quarter turn for the door. I was always at the rear of the procession at this point and would have to push past stirring tails and heaving dog jowls to get the door open.

            The park was four blocks away. A citified oasis of nature in the midst of a small suburb in the midst of the Oregonian wilderness.  Washington Park, the copper sign proclaimed and I guessed it was named in homage to our first president, though the entire state of Oregon and Mr. Washington had never crossed paths. The park’s claim to fame was that it was designed by the same person who did Central Park in NYC. There were paved paths and shaped shrubs and tulip patches in the Spring and sculptures and benches and fountains, but best of all, and this was where we were heading, in the exact center was an off-leash dog park.

This was Oriander, Oregon. A tiny village 30 minutes outside of Bozeman with a population of just under 8,000. How such a spec on the map as this got a park designed by a famous person, I’ll never know, but the dog’s and I enjoyed it almost daily and didn’t ask questions.

            Bongo was always first off the leash. He was the oldest. Well, probably. He was an overfed golden retriever Maryann had adopted one year out of college. He was a Humane Society rescue and the vet there’s best guess was that our big boy was 8 years old. And that was two years ago. Bongo’s long hair was tinged red the entire length of his back and white along his eyebrows and muzzle.

            Chevy’s age was known: four. It was his genetic heritage that was a puzzle. Though he definitely looked canine, Maryann and I had strong suspicions that there was a diesel engine somewhere in his family tree. He was brown and furry and my best guess was that he was part Mastiff, part Bloodhound, and for the rest my guess changed from day to day. Some days I’d swear there was Chihuahua blood coursing within his veins when he’d cower at a squirrel chastising us through a window. Other days I’d guess decorated greyhound for how fast he’s manage to squirm through my arms, out the door and miles from home the very moment I removed his collar for a bath. And now you know why he smelled a bit riper than most indoor dogs. Chevy hated baths and I put off the events for the longest span that we could tolerate.

Maryann was an interior designer. She loved pretty fabrics and filled our cramped space with velvet and cotton and jackard and even chintz. She and the fabrics could tolerate a far shorter span of dirty Chevy than Bongo and I could.

Today, was bath day. My plan was simple: wear him out so that he put up less of a fight. I’d played football in my high school years and kept fit, Chevy and I were pretty evenly matched. But if we met for a challenge, me full of vim, vigor and coffee and him drained by a morning dog park frolic…well, then. I forsaw a victory in my future, a clean dog and a happy girlfriend.

            What I did when I wasn’t walking and washing dogs was review computer codes. I worked from home and it afforded me the freedom to set my own schedule. No commute, no shirt nor tie, no cubicle. That is, as long as I leashed myself to the black rolling chair in the office and assured the quality of just enough computer codes to turn my brain to mush. 

August was coming to a close and the normally lush lawns that marched against the sidewalk that wove us toward Washington Park sported highlights of gold and made the slightest crisping sound when the dog’s feet padded across their edges. In a rare move against public pastime, the mayor of Oriander had instituted odd/even watering restrictions. Odd numbered addresses could water on odd numbered dates, and the same for even numbered. The mostly aging residents of the usually moist town had yet to come up with a replacement for moving the hose around the yard, washing the cars, rinsing leaves from the driveway and spraying.

            Generally, when rain was scarce for more than a few days or when they themselves felt like chatting with neighbors, but didn’t want to appear like they did, the residents of Oriander would hand-spray their lawns. This summer had been unusually dry and the neighbors quickly ran out of clever things to say to each other. As dry spells linked together into a speckled summer of little rain, neighbors moved beyond small talk and began to learn more about the individuals they shared acreage with.

            The mayor couldn’t have picked a worse time to “start huggin’ trees” as his suddenly more social voting public liked to grumble. They would curse his name in mumbled tones as they cranked on their spigots once the sun set so they could feed their lawns emerald in twilight defiance. And so, for the first time since the inventory catalogue offered them, Rich Gahler, the owner of the mainstreet hardware store, had completely sold out of sprinklers. 

            “You can basically make one out of a hunk of PVC pipe. Just drill some holes in it and cap the ends. Use a connector like this to hook it to your hose,” a white-haired man was saying to a skeptical mother of two squirming toddlers. The squirmiest of which was just easing his head out from under the shoulder harness of his jogging stroller. A wiggle and a half more and the boy- much to the astonishment of his fellow prisoner- was free. His blond hair was static-y and waved like feathers in the barely there breeze of the store’s threshold as he climbed down the front tricycle wheel of his ride. His eyes, a moment ago, holding that look of one waiting to have a something heavy dropped upon his head, took on unbridled pride. He stood erect, to his full height of just over 24 inches tall, took a breath and dashed to the left off the sidewalk and without a pause, onto the black topped road of mainstreet. Here near the shops, where the road was narrow and parking was limited, cars were parallel parked along the curb. The boy was between the nose of a rusty Jeep and the tail of a shiny Volvo for only two steps before he dashed headlong into the path of an oncoming blur of metal.

I saw all this happening but didn’t realize the danger until that moment when I also realized that it was too late to do anything. I dropped the dog’s leashes and though I was much too far away to reach him in time, I ran toward the boy. A few things happened all at once. I heard screaming- my own. I was still a dozen feet away from the toddling blond head when the oncoming car buzzed past my hip not slowing. I reached for the car’s rear fender illogically thinking to slow it or maybe hoping the driver would see my frantic focus on the now- hidden head mere feet beyond its front bumper. Then a blur of brown streaked through my field of vision obscuring everything I had my eyes trained on.

There came a sound so similar to one I’d heard only minutes before, like toenails on linoleum but more metallic, as a large dog leapt into the path of the sedan, back legs nicking the headlamp, the screech of brakes and then, that sickening sound of a soft body hitting pavement too hard.

The Bow Tie Consequence

Charlie is 8 and he had a week of making some very poor choices. Ugh, I honestly had to sigh out loud right there because of how draining it is just to think about the parenting I've done, let alone, how draining it is to actually be the bad guy making parenting decisions lightning fast when punishment is required.

    I've written a few times about what a star Charlie is, how he's my best friend and as a whole has every quality that if I were creating my best friend Frankenstein/avatar style, he'd be it.  He's incredible and he's only 8. And it breaks my heart that he chooses to show other people his crazy side. A crazy side that lately has grown until there's no possibility that a bystander could see around it's far reaching spikes to the goodness of the little heart standing behind the broken sunroof in the friend's car or the broken light in the church ceiling or the teacher at her wit's end. I should stop there.

Pick any one of the mistakes he's made in the last week and I would likely just brush it aside. Talk to him, of course, let him know I'm disappointed and let him know what's expected and why and then he'd have to make it right.  Is it this formula where the mistake lies? Am I that lenient parent of that child in class- you know the kind, every class has one- the one that other people know stories about, the one that you really don't want your angel sitting by, the one you give a little tighter smile to because you know he's undisciplined. Or is this where my mistake lies? -- Do I discipline him too much because I fear him becoming that kid?

I surely fear that.  I love Charlie and I want him to feel love from other people.  I want them to see how outstandingly kind and thoughtful he is and for him to watch that awareness come into their eyes and I want him to feel that awesome power of being loved and I want him to experience it over and over until he's just glowing.  I'm so afraid that he's missing precious years of positive reinforcement. I lived on that stuff when I was a kid. I don't want to imagine his days devoid of it.

But time waits for no man and Charlie hasn't waited for me to figure out my balance on the parenting tightrope and last week was a doozy so here we are on the eve of the weekend before Christmas and I don't know how to discipline him.

From the parenting books I have read, you speak to a kid's mind by finding their personal currency- something they care about.  Charlie is all about free- time.  Grounding is a good fit. For each of the pretty major infractions he's had, he's sentenced to a day in his room. (just for posterity's sake, a normal grounding in my book is 1 hour in his room- the seriousness of the mistakes earned more.) But I don't want to ground him on Christmas. But his excuse for making a few mistakes was "I forgot", so obviously this is not a boy where I can put off the consequence.  He has a very short attention span and punishment has to come swiftly or it just feels cruel in his mind.

At the same time, I'm not grounding him as retribution. I don't want to be paid back for his mistakes, I want him to learn from them. So what can I do to help him learn? What can I do to help him earn an ungrounding for the holidays? And here we are at the crux of why I'm writing this. The bow tie consequence.

I made Charlie a blue bow tie for church a few Sundays ago. To his credit, he wore it, but hated every minute of it. It was like watching a dog suffer the embarrassment of a big plastic cone on its head. He covered it with his hand, tucked his neck so it was hidden, screwed around in his seat so no one could see him- there wasn't a second that he forgot that he was wearing that bow tie. Last night when we were trying to figure out why Charlie was making such poor choices in such rapid succession, he kept saying, "I forgot" or, "I just wanted to".  As I talked with him, I folded his clothes. We talked about how the bad was already done, we'd do our best to undo it, but he needed to be sorry. I folded his shirts. While I folded his pants we talked about how he was going to lose some freedom until I felt that I could trust him to make good choices again. We talked mostly about how his behavior needed to change immediately. That tomorrow at school he would be a shining beacon of self control or these morning lectures and sadness would continue until he got it. He was worried that he wouldn't be able to remember to keep his hands to himself. And I was feeling that is was truly unfair of me to expect him to be perfect.  He's a little boy, they like to poke people in the hall- really, what's one little poke? Would I really ground him on Christmas if he makes one mistake?  And then I remembered that for him, this wouldn't be 1 little poke, this would be the 100th poke, the 200th time he ignored a teacher, the nth time he broke something because he was being too wild. Charlie has used up his warnings and beyond. I'm supposed to be teaching him how to be an adult and I need to help him become someone who gets positive reactions from people. I'm all he's got for a life coach and I've let him be squirrely and because of that he's had too many eyes look at him like he's the bad kid.  I need to reign him in.  More than that, I need to teach him to reign himself in.

  But could I really ground him on Christmas and would that do any good?
 Continued after the jump:

Charlie turns 8

 This is a collection of the photos that, I think, really sum up Charlie. He's turning 8 this year!

  He's careful and meticulous in his thinking.


He's a goof.

He adores being with friends and family, it's like candy for the sweet tooth of his soul.

He's a bonder. He latches on to people and REALLY loves them. He would leap through fire for his uncle and his cousin-- and I'm not talking, to save them, I mean he'd leap through it just to merely hang out with them for an afternoon.

There's never a dull moment in his head.

Above is the family picture we won't be using. Zoom in on Charlie...  I have cartons of pictures like this. Imagine the caption on that Christmas card: "Hope you've been good this year! Or else!"

 And on top of being a wild man, just barely tamed and living in suburbia, he has the gentlest heart.

I once read a book about people who have a near death experience and the things they learned.  There were two. First, is all that matters is how you treat people. And the next is that the individuals always wished they had had more fun when they were living.
             Charlie is living right.
  I should take a picture of his closet; there's hardly a toy in it. Not because we don't buy him loads but because he's constantly giving them away. Whether it's his brand new birthday present RC car or a stuffed bear or a pair of shoes.  He'll make these "gift baskets" and put them on his neighbor buddy's doorsteps or he'll send his playmates home with something they showed an interest in. The first few times he did this I was happy and proud for him, but last year it got extreme when he was giving away video games he'd never even opened. So, one dayI sat him down and talked about limiting his generosity to small tokens of friendship. That night he went out sledding with a neighbor girl.  She didn't wear gloves and guess who gave up his? He came in that night with frozen, chapped hands and when I asked, a little angrily, where his gloves were, he bowed his head like he was confessing a great crime and told me what happened.
    From that day forward, I don't get in the way of Charlie's big heart anymore. Charlie is my best friend and I firmly believe he is here to teach me to be a better person.

10-Year Olds and Friendship

More than once I've caught myself wishing I could make friends like the ones I had when I was a kid. The kind of friend you never feel awkward around. Even if you showed up at her house dressed like a big goober and she told you and at this point you really should feel awkward, instead you'd both laugh and that goober outfit would become the spark for an inside joke that the two of you would forever share. 

You could plan a day of biking to the gas station, it would rain, or mom would come up with a bucket-load of chores sidelining the planned outing and it didn't matter- a great time would be had anyway. 

 Just because I was with a friend.

I'm old now, all grown-up and moved away from my childhood friends. I've had to make new friends and have been really fortunate with the awesome ladies who've let me be their pals. A few times in the last years, I've caught myself wanting to call up some of my new friends when nervousness kicks in and I worry that this call will be the one that clues them in to the fact that I'm a nerd. 

  Where did that crippling awkwardness come from? Did it hitchhike in on birthday candles, growing a bit each year? Why do I worry before meeting a friend for lunch? Why do I put off hosting a crafting get-together because I'm worried it might be a dud?

And why do I assume that I can't have friends like I did when I was little?

  Yesterday, I watched my daughter and her best friend play. They'd hold hands, flit from one activity to another and discuss so seriously the details of which pencils were their favorites. My youngest daughter thinks she's part of the club and ran happily out to join the big girls. She must have come directly from a potty break, because she showed up with her skirt tucked into her panties.

The older girls giggled.

   And then they helped her.

                          And then they went right back to playing; all three of them.

What's the 10 year old girl's secret to an awesome friendship?

  Love.

That's it.  They love each other and so they trust each other and are open with their thoughts. This seems to banish all the self-absorbed worries and open the day to happiness. 

And I don't think there's an age-limit for this trick.

It's not ground-breaking science, but I think friend-making abilities are not age-related nor environmental.  I think they come from within. I looked over what I wrote above and a few words pop out- worry, nervous.  Two feelings that those wise 10 year olds don't even allow space. If I want to have friendships like I did when I was young, then I need to quit worrying and just love.

 And also trust that time is constant and if

I'm still the same goober I was at 10, then I should be able to find similar goober-accepting people now.

But mostly, I should quit worrying and just love. 

I want to be one of those old grandmas in the first picture with a best bud or two to grow old with. They're laughing about something and my guess is that they're laughing at each other.

  So, future old bitty friend of mine, you agree to come over for a crafting night and I promise that my clothing choices will be the continual fodder for decades' worth of inside jokes just waiting to be made.


Dedicated to Allison, who really did teach me everything I know about friendship and never made me feel like a goober.











 

God's squirt gun, the proper recipe for toad slime and other kid secrets

Since I choose to do my computer work next to an open window, I usually spend more time watching and listening to the kids. Between you and me, productivity is not why I sit there.

For most of the morning a toad hunt has been underway, but the day was getting hot and a cluster of neighborhood kids were now gathered in the shade of a tree near our house.

"Guess how big God's squirt gun would be?" a blond neighbor boy asks. There's a pause as all the kids look around furtively like they sense that the conversation had just veered toward the deep secrets of the universe, and more importantly, that they are bound to get into trouble for it. It always gets me, where kids expect discipline to could come from and then the frog-in-the-fridge-because-he-was-hot times when they couldn't be more surprised.

My daughter, who's the oldest in the group and therefore considered the sagest, pipes up, "Well I don't know, but it has to be the opposite of Tinkerbell's." A nodding of all the heads in the group. Little frowns, little furrowed brows, it looks like Congress.

"Can I add the flowers now?" Rosalie asks.  I hadn't noticed before, but she's got a pot of what looks like mud and a stick to stir it with. The other thing I newly notice is that it isn't a pot, but one of my best tupperwares. The big one, that I always stuff leftovers into and they magically always seem to just fit.

"Sure, but slowly, so you can stop if the potion gets chunky."

"I've mashed the berries and he's gonna love this," the neighbor boy with the deep questions adds.  There's 6 of them all huddled over the bucket of swirling brown alternately stirring and adding precise extractions from their pockets. I make out that this potion is for the leprechaun who lives in the base of a nearby tree.

 As it turns out, he is the reason there are no toads to be caught this morning.

"He wrangles them," explains my 7 yr old son who recently saw part of Shane. In one of those rarely witnessed moments, he has his arm around S and is filling in his little sister and with the seriousness that kids can only muster when they're trying to catch something; he's teaching her the finer points of leprechaun culture. They don't have cars. Of course they don't, they're too short to reach the pedals. Leprechauns travel by toadback through underground passageways that connect their trees to the trees of other good little children. He grins at her, and I can tell that he's added this last part for the exact same reason that I say things like, "Santa always knows who's good and who's bad."

As I watch, the kids add pine cones and bits of string, spit from each of them and even some mashed up worms.  From the groans and giggles I can tell that it has to be truly rank smelling. The theory behind the potion seems to be that if a good child sprinkles some around a leprechaun's door at night, then that leprechaun will come to investigate and when he opens the door all the toads will get out. I picture an old woman in her bathrobe and curlers peering out after being ding-dong-ditched and the dag-nabbed cat slipping out.

Charlie speeds into the house and past me to retrieve a carton of rotten cottage cheese from our trashcan and into the potion it goes. As usually happens with adult life, I get distracted with work and lose track of the kids for awhile until I hear a gut-wrenching wail coming from outside.  It's K, my oldest, I know immediately by the voice and I also know, like a knife to my core, that she's hurt and hurt badly. I fly outside, preparing for a broken leg, a skinless arm, 9 fingers-- something serious-- but when I get to her I see it's nothing like that.

And I run to go get my camera.

Charlie fills me in on the details, though, by the smell and the sight of my now empty tupperware, I can guess the gist. K decided since they had to wait until nightfall to put out the potion that it would be safest waiting up in a tree.  She spied a branch, hoisted the slop-filled bucket up and then... it toppled onto her own head.

Maybe the leprechaun had a few tricks up his sleeve for protecting his wrangled toads.

Or maybe, just maybe, the Great Smiter really doesn't appreciate discussions about his summer toy collection.

A Not Very Easter Story

In the Spring of my fourteenth year, my best friend and I were just returning from a walk to the neighborhood gas station where we frequently went to buy candy.  It was nearly Easter and so our parents had locked down the snacks normally provided in the cookie jar because they said we'd be getting loads of candy in a few days.
    On this particular day we found solace in a few boxes of Lemonheads and were just making our way home. As we rounded the final hill on the return to my house we saw a bunny in the middle of the road.  Or at least it was a bunny before it got hit by a car. It was now very dead.
    We did the classic sweet little girl thing. Our faces pulled into frowns and we chattered as we walked, "Awww, it's so sad! Bunnies are the cutest. Awww."

      But as we got closer to the dead bunny-- which took awhile because we were pretty far away when we first noticed the thing-- the amazingness of the perfectly preserved body began to edge out our girlyness. First of all, there was a tire tread going right over the center of the body. A perfect tire tread, like the ones you see across the coyote's belly in the Roadrunner cartoons. The bunny's ears were still perked, the insides pink. His fur was the softest of caramel colors and seemed to shimmer as it blew in the light breeze. I'd seen a lot of road kill in my life, but it was always kind of a guessing game as to what it could be. (Hmm, it's brown, it's furry... Cat?  No, it's striped.. Racoon! Definitely racoon. But really you were never positive.)  This dead bunny was so obviously a dead bunny from even a soccer field away that it held our respect.
   "Man, that is one perfect dead bunny," Allison said.

    It was at that moment that the full potential of our situation presented itself.

    Now I can't remember which of us came up with the idea first but before I knew it, Allison and I were running through the front doors of my house on a mission. We raided all my Easter supplies. Cheap pastel baskets, tons of pink and yellow plastic grass, around thirty candy-hued plastic eggs and even a few foil covered chocolates from the previous Easter. (My grandma had a habit of sending these packed in a box with soap and a kid only makes the mistake of eating a Dial-flavored chocolate once.)
      We carted all this stuff back to the road and the site of the dead bunny and got to work. We tossed down plastic eggs, stomping on a few for good effect. The foil chocolates and the Easter grass were dumped around the center yellow line as well, and then, last of all, we nudged an Easter basket beneath the dead bunny's front paw.

      It brings a tear to my eye just remembering how perfect it all was. We had just staged the scene of the Easter Bunny's demise.

I wish I could tell you that this all took place on such a small road that no cars came by that day. Especially cars with children in them. But, no. Allison and I spent the afternoon in fits of laughter as we watched vehicle after vehicle swerve and gawk. We busted a gut watching child after child do that open-mouthed muted wail from the backseat as she instantly understood what she was seeing.

   Best Easter ever.