Pigs' Ears

My dog is dying. Maybe.

He's had two tumors--bone cancer--in his paw, and a toe amputation. And now he's on painkillers, and the vet says he has to stay on painkillers the rest of his life. Which means, I think we can assume that the vet believes my dog will be in pain the rest of his life.

Massive moral dilemma. Serious self-examinations.

Surely it's best to send Rowan gently into the good night, painfree evermore. Except. . . I take painkillers. When I don't, I hurt. Yet I like my life. I enjoy it. I would fight really really hard to keep it. If any higher life form were to decide that I'd be so much better off dead, I would resent it, to put it mildly. So if Rowan needs drugs to get him through the day, is that so bad? He's done his doggy duty; all he asks is to sprawl on the rug next to us, take the occasional quick walk, and chomp down a regular supply of treats.

And then. . . what if there's a part of me that wants the dog to die---no, no, I am not that bad, but what if there's a part of me that just can't cope with what it means for the dog to keep on living? The part of me that's sick of mopping up the regular piles of vomit. That retches at the sight of his mangled paw. That clenches at the sight of the blood splotches winding their way throughout the house. That crumbles when he looks at me, trusting, in pain, sure I'll fix it.

I dunno. How do you judge when life is no longer living? Especially when it's not your life, but a life entrusted to you?

Rowan still likes pigs' ears. Is that enough? Is that a life worth living? How do we decide? Must we decide? I dunno. Maybe a nice crunchy pig's ear is all one can really expect, all one should really want, from life. I look at my poor mangled dog, and I just don't know. But he's still crunching. Damn. More than I can say for myself on many a day.

Declaration of Intent

Earlier this week Keith and I and a group of friends went to hear Neal Conan from NPR's "Talk of the Nation." Conan has always struck me as incredibly witty and sane so I figured it would be a great talk. It wasn't. It wasn't bad, mind you, but Conan said nothing that we all didn't already know. Of course, maybe I hang out with an incredibly sophisticated, educated, and articulate crowd. Anyway, afterward, everyone headed to one of the friend's houses for drinks. Except me. I went home to bed.

I do not like being The Person Who Goes Home to Bed. The person who has trouble staying awake past 9 pm. The person whose first reaction to any kind of invitation is to think, "Do I have to?" The person whose idea of an especially good time is to be alone with a big bowl of vegetarian chili and a Doctor Who episode.

All evidence to the contrary, I really am not that person. The real me loves to spend time with good friends. The real me has a passion for politics and intense conversation. The real me enjoys exploring and engaging and experimenting. It's just that the real me has somehow gotten encased in, swallowed up by this carcass, this husk that seems to consist of nothing but aches. Every morning I wake and make plans, blueprints, reallly, for how to construct the day so that I am really me. And every day the husk makes a mockery of those plans, distorts the blueprints.

And it's really pissing me off.

My yoga instructor ends every class with this meditation: breathing deeply, she intones, "Embrace, affirm, accept your body, just as it is, just where it is, here and now, at this moment." Right. Not a chance. There's me and there's the husk and between us is the line in the sand. I have had it. I hereby declare war.

Bitter Woman

Keith is watching football. LSU vs. West Virginia. God. I hate football.

I shouldn't be bitter.

I'm not. I Am Not A Bitter Woman.

The thing is, we had a very short courtship. So it came as something of a surprise that I found myself married to a sports fanatic. Somehow, this fanaticism just hadn't really surfaced in the months, umm, weeks, of our pre-marriage romance.

You might think that as the younger sister of five older brothers, I was prepared for Sports Fanaticism. But my big brothers were more into cars and cigarettes and beer and drugs. We were Cubs fans, because my much-loved grandma was a Cubs fan. And being a Cubs fan went well with beer and cigarettes, frankly-- add a hotdog with mustard and relish, and Life Is Good. But football?? Dad watched the Bears on Sundays in the depth of winter when he could laugh at "those idiots" floundering in the snow. And my brothers were far too stoned to care.

So, here I sit, with this man who cares intensely. Who actually just now said, as he moved the chair so he could be right in  front of our rather small tv, "Can you see?"--as if I cared. But he can't imagine I don't care. Which is so sweet. And just so damn weird.

Weird as it is, I'd be ok with it, if it were just LSU football. I mean, I get obsession. Obsession is ok. I have my obsessions. Doctor Who. Bruce Springsteen. And everything Paul Newman has ever done. And I ritualistically, fatalistically, follow the Cubs, as part of my birthright. So, if Keith were simply obsessed with LSU football, really, I'd be ok with that. But, here's the deal: I thought The Game was this afternoon. Because Keith spent the entire friggin' afternoon watching football. But that was other football. Gettin' ready football. Preparatory football.  Foreplay football.

Keith is watching football. LSU vs. West Virginia. God. I hate football.

And yes. I Am A Bitter Woman.

This I'd Like to Forget

So, the thing is, I lied in my last post.  Not "lying" as in "actively making stuff up"--everything I wrote was true; we did go to a tiny Greek island  and we did have an amazing experience--but "lying" as in "consciously omitting big chunks of that experience."

The truth, the whole truth. . . the whole truth is hard.

Like that friend that Owen made? The one who made him feel ok once again? What I didn't write was that when we returned home to Manchester Owen wrote and tried to phone this boy several times. He never responded. Owen was devastated.

And Hugh's jaunts out and about the village? The whole truth demands that these jaunts be set against our previous 48 hours in Rhodes. An entirely unexpected stay (a storm prevented us from taking the boat to Halki as planned), it caught us without any preparation. We ALWAYS prepared before going anywhere with Hugh, who could have been the poster child for ADHD at that point in his young life. So as we wandered about  Rhodes, trying to fill the time, Hugh kept running away from us. Keith was of the mindset that, well, he'll be fine, let's not worry about it.Right. A five year old. In a friggin' foreign city. A friggin' foreign city filled with insane Greek teenage boys on mopeds.  Fiinally, frustrated and furious, I lost it and began screaming at Hugh while I smacked him on his bottom--right on a busy sidewalk. A cluster of Greek women, witnesses to my breakdown, clucked in horror and shook their heads. I hated them with an intensity I am still ashamed to admit to.

And the entire Greek idyll needs to be reframed in the awareness of the the fact that we never ever worked as a family. I know all siblings fight: I have six of my own. But, as anyone who has spent any time with Hugh and Owen together will testify, "sibling rivalry" in no way adequately describes my sons' relationship. They have rarely interacted like brothers, rarely played together, rarely enjoyed each other, rarely hung out--and never ever looked to the other for comfort or companionship, never even bonded together in an alliance against us. A constant strain, a source of deep grief, the antipathy between the two of them of course simply intensified on family holidays as they had to endure each other for hours and days on end. I remember a good family friend spending some time with us on one such vacation and then turning to me and saying, "Why do you do this? This isn't good for any of you. Just stop it. There's no law that says you all have to vacation together." It took me a long time to give up, to stop it, as she advised. I did, eventually. The four of us have not traveled together since 2002. But that was after Greece.

And then there's the constant fact, the thread that weaves through my adult life: I didn't sleep for the entire trip. And I had a headache every single damned day. So that hilltop abandoned monastery that Owen climbed to? He wanted me to come along. He begged me to come along. But I didn't. I was too fucking tired.

The whole truth.

But surely it's better to forget it, isn't it? Owen is a beautiful man and Hugh is on his way to becoming one. They still loathe each other, but I guess that just as there's no law requiring family vacations, there's also no law requiring brothers to like each other.

This all started with olives. And if every time I eat an olive I want to remember the four of us, eating and laughing together, on a Greek island, rather than all the rest, that's ok, isn't it? All those surveys showing that people become so much happier omce they hit their 50s--I'll bet forgetting plays an essential, probably the central, role there.

This I believe: that one is better off forgetting the whole truth.

This I Believe

National Public Radio runs this periodic bit called "This I Believe," where ordinary and sometimes not-so-ordinary folks talk about what they believe--not always, or in fact, not usually, in the religious or dogmatic sense, but rather, in day-to-day life. Fill in the blank I believe in __________.

Everytime I hear one of these segments I think, "I believe in. . . olives."

This concerns me. What sort of person believes in olives? What does that mean?

So,tonight, fueled by a couple of glasses of wine, I intend to find out. Here goes.

I believe in olives.

I believe in the memories they conjure, of a tiny Greek village on the tiny island of Halki close to the Turkish coast, and of a magical week spent there when the boys were little. Once sustained by diving for sponges, Halki's population turned to honey cultivation after an epidemic wiped out the sponges. Then the honey bees died, and now --or then; this was 11 years ago--Halki survives solely on the tourist revenue generated by a small English company specializing in "unknown Greece."

Our time there was magical--a villa on the harbor, with our own steep descent into the water, and this little village containing nothing but the bakery where we bought our breakfast pastries, a beautiful church, an ice cream parlor, an assortment of tiny houses and five other tourist villas, one souvenir shop, one minscule grocery store, two beaches (one with a donkey and one without), and four harborside cafes. Every day, two decisions to make: where do we eat lunch? and where do we eat dinner? Not that it mattered; each of the cafes offered the same stunning view, the same just-off-the-boat seafood, the same heavenly feta cheese, the same to-die-for tomato and olive salads.

In Halki we sent 5-year-old Hugh off every morning to collect the bread and pastries for breakfast. He was so proud, so pleased to be off on his own, trusted with money, able to wind his way through the stone streets and across the church courtyard to the bakery. The villagers loved him, with his dark brown skin and curly brown-black hair and big brown eyes. In just one week, he chrmed them all, the quiet priest, the cranky young cashier in the souvenir shop, the old lady at the bakery, the fishermen in their boats. 

In Halki ten-year-old Owen, lonely and beaten down after a year being bullied in English state schools, met a friend, a fellow Harry Potter fan. They climbed up to an abandoned monastery and talked about Hogwarts and Owen remembered what it was to be ok.

I eat olives and in the salty tang and the soft yet firm texture, I taste sunny days and spiced lamb and a friendly donkey and a fresh breeze across the harbor and my boys. Happy. Thriving. Laughing.

This I believe. In olives. And my sons.

Ordinary People

September 11, 2011. Listening to the memorial service at Ground Zero. Former President Bush reads from a letter Abraham Lincoln wrote to a woman whose several sons died in the Union army: he has no words to comfort her in her loss but  he hopes she will accept the gratitude of the Republic that her sons died trying to save.

Bush reads this letter to an audience consisting of the family members of individuals who died in the Twin Towers on 9/11. Presumably they are to infer their loved ones died to save the Republic.

But, umm, is that what they were doing? Saving the Republic? I thought they were getting coffee, settling down to another day at the desk, riding the elevator, leaving the train, reading the paper, making a phone call, checking their email. . . just doing the ordinary things that ordinary people do in their ordinary lives.
Not the Republic's Saviors. Just ordinary people going about their ordinary business on what they assumed would be an ordinary day. Isn't that the tragedy? the horror? the crime? That they weren't soldiers on a tour of duty, let alone knights on a quest? They were just Jean and Bill and Pablo and Irina and Melissa and Miguel and Tony and Noreen. Just folks. Secretaries and janitors and clerks and salesmen and brokers. 

Maybe one, maybe several, maybe several hundreds of those that died that strange, horrible morning died thinking of the Republic. But I doubt it. I'll bet the last thing every one of those folks in the Towers thought of was incredibly ordinary--maybe a husband of average looks, intelligence, and prospects; a child not destined for greatness; a mom who looks just like countless other old ladies; a set of memories of a life filled with the mundane. But the mundane is where we, the ordinary people, live. Add up the mundane and it's our lives. And by God, dear God, please God, in all the mundane there is so much that matters. Why, then, reach for rhetorical abstractions, why disguise ordinary people as willing warriors in some kind of national crusade?

I haven't a clue what "the Republic" means. But an ordinary day in an ordinary place with an ordinary family and ordinary and friends? Oh, yes, I know what that means. It's worth all the world.

Hisses and Yowls

We got a new kitty. I thought Wimsey was lonely and needed a playmate, now that the Peeing Kitty has been banished to the outdoors, and there at the vet's was this tiny, friendly, adorable orange tabby. So I brought Marple home.

Total disaster. Unlike Wimsey, tiny, friendly, adorable Marple comes equipped with rapier-sharp claws which he has yet to learn how to retract. He frenetically, ceaselessly, desperately pounces on Wimsey--playwithme comeoncomeon playwithmeplaywithmeeeee. Wimsey loathes him and our household now pulsates with hisses and yowls.

I watch them and I remember the summer I was ten, when we took a family vacation to the Ozarks. My two oldest brothers had grown out of such trips but my parents insisted that the third in the line-up, 16-year-old Jeff, come along. It was of course the Dark Ages of family travel, long before mini-vans or house-sized SUVs, with no in-car video players or headphones or iPods. Jeff just had to sit and endure us all, two younger brothers and two younger sisters and of course Mom and Dad, for the entire two-day trip down from Chicago. I don't think he ever spoke. He certainly never smiled. Once in the Ozarks, we settled into two adjoining hotel rooms on the second floor overlooking the outdoor pool--the three boys in one room, 7-year-old Cheryl and me and my parents next door--and several days of morning jaunts and afternoons playing in the pool. Except for Jeff, who hunkered down in the hotel room, where he read Popular Mechanics and engaged in lengthy masturbation sessions. (The automobile obsession I knew about at the time; I only learned about the autoeroticism much much later.) Jeff's sullen refusal to join in the family fun drove us younger kids crazy; we'd periodically pounce on him--playwithusplaywithuspleeeese-- but no matter how hard we tried, all we got was a bunch of  hisses and yowls.

16-year-old Hugh is home from school for the weekend. He arrived at 5:00 pm Friday night, put down his dirty laundry, picked up the car keys, and headed out to hang out with friends. We agreed he could spend the night at a friend's house--with Tropical Storm Lee bucketing down on us, it seemed a sensible plan. Except he didn't come home til 6 pm the next day, and only when we called and insisted he do so.  "We want to see you," we said. "We want to have dinner with you, talk with you, spend some time with you." Much hissing and yowling on his side; increasingly desperate pouncing on ours: Playwithus playwithus comeoncomeon itwillbefun you'llseeyou'llseeee. . .