This is in the foyer as you enter the North Hudson Center, where I teach Basic English II and III. It was like this for approximately three weeks before somebody else noticed and fixed it.
And they wonder why they have to over-register my classes every single semester.
Yesterday I had the dubious pleasure of meeting the hairiest, most enormous spider in the galaxy.
There I was in the kitchen, eating a ham sandwich (shades of Mama Cass) before heading out to teach my evening class. Not really paying much attention to anything. I'm not sure where it came from (the ceiling? one of my houseplants? the moon?) but I heard something hit the floor.
That's right, heard it hit the floor. Jonas, who has a habit of sitting near my feet when ham sandwiches are involved, took a few steps.
Backward.
I looked over, expecting....I don't know. A large cat toy. A mouse. A bird. One of the other cats. T-rex. Something of substance that would freak poor Jonas out if it hit the floor and made that much noise.
And there. It. Was.
It was the size of a quarter. A big, black, hairy quarter with legs. A fast quarter. I am told that I made the girliest sound anyone's ever heard out of me before asking calmly for someone with bigger feet to come step on it, but I'm rather proud because I did not actually jump up onto the chair and go full Homer-Simpson-scream, complete with wagging tongue.
I'm usually in charge of killing spiders in my household, by default. We had a deal: I don't get near multi-pedes, and he doesn't do spiders. Hey, marriage is a compromise, right? Let me tell you. If this had been our house, I would have signed a peace treaty with the sucker and given him sovereign domain over his half of the kitchen. But I'm at my folks', so I did what any self-reliant woman would do in my situation: I hollered for my daddy.
Now, frequently I will talk to bugs while I am escorting them out of the house so they don't become a cat-snack, and when outside I respect that I am a guest in the bugs' house and act accordingly.
But if something has eight legs and its own zip code, all bets are off.
I am developing an ever-deepening relationship with my Honda Civic Hybrid. As the weeks pass, we spend more and more time together. Some of my friends are starting to talk. It's pretty intense, this renewed closeness. We haven't spent this much time together in almost a year, when I used to drive down the Taconic every weekday morning. But then, we were always on the go, back and forth and up and down over the hills, to work and back, running errands, visiting family. Now it's different. Sometimes we just sit, quietly, and watch the sun rise over the blocked-off express lanes of Route 78. Other mornings we sing together while I sip my coffee, waiting my turn in the Turnpike traffic. Everything matters more these mornings, even our destination.
In the afternoons it's off to the library, or--on Thursdays--a trip to the Pineys, to a sweet little idyll where the students are fresh-faced and witty and speak a language I understand. Sometimes the afternoons fill me with dread, but once my car and I set off, it disappears and we're together again, just the two of us and occasionally the Indigo Girls or Rory Block.
And then there are the evening drives home. These are more carefree, with the windows rolled down and the songs pouring out onto the highway as I contemplate whether I will grade papers before my bath, or just dive headlong into my pillow for a few brief hours of unconsciousness before I rejoin my true blue companion. It is nights like this I understand what it is like to be a dog, with my head out the window in the night air, my ears flopping in the breeze, trying to stay awake and stay between the lines but at the same time giddy with a sense of refound freedom: tomorrow I can sleep in until 6.
I was the only kid in the church who wasn't scared to death of him, his gravelly voice and his slow, stern way of pronouncing things. Everyone's horror was 6th grade CCD, because Father Nester taught it. There could be no goofing off.
Because my parents loved him so, and because my dad decided while Father Nester was our pastor that he was giong to study to be a deacon, we had a really strange, close relationship with him. On rare occasions that we went out to dinner and he didn't wear his collar (this is a guy who ALWAYS wore a black suit jacket with his collar and shirt, and hardly ever even wore a short sleeved black shirt. He was seriously Old School.) the waiters always thought he was a great uncle or a grandfather. Essentially, that's what he became.
He was at the wedding, and Robin took several wonderful shots of him (I'll check and see if I have any on the computer, because they're truly great). This is the guy my husband and I stopped by in the limo to bring to the wedding reception on our way from the church--the one I ran up the stairs to meet. He's been in the nursing home (fortunately they have a priest wing) for the past couple of months, because he's getting goofy....the medical term is dementia, but apparently the legal term for people who run or inspect nursing homes is "goofy."
Last night at 1:30 we got a phone call from the nursing home--my dad is his legal power of attorney, since he's outlived most of his family except a few nephews in St. Louis and California--saying he'd fallen, and they were taking him to the hospital. And that was all they could tell us. 4:30, when we'd finally all just gotten back to sleep, the doctor called from the hospital and told us he'd hit his head, and my dad gave him some permissions for procedures (can we do an MRI? can we give him oxygen? what if we need to do surgery? does he have a living will, what are his resuscitation wishes, etc etc....all covering their bases.) He hadn't broken his hip again, but he'd whacked his head pretty hard. Again, that's all we knew. So we went back to bed.
My dad just got back from the hospital. He is alive, but prognosis is not good.
He's got a pretty large subdural hematoma on the right side.....and a couple of other little bleeders. They don't know whether it resulted from the fall, or caused the fall. It's hard to tell. They decided not to operate, because they're not sure if they can stop the bleeding, and even if they could it wouldn't make him any better. He's conscious, but sleeping (quite possibly related to having been up in the middle of the night, and who knows how conscious he was through everything.) They have him on oxygen, and they're going to move him from ICU tomorrow, and wait and see. Watch and pray.
He was talking to my dad last week about how he doesn't like where he's staying, and he wants to "sneak away quietly, like a pussycat," to live somewhere. I only hope that's what he's doing now, and that he's going home. This man has a faith that has been sorely tested. He entered the priesthood relatively late, in his thirties. Before that, he was married, and lost his wife. He was an alcoholic for a number of years, but has been in recovery for longer than I've been alive (which explains the constant cups of coffee). He's the only father my mom has known since her own father died when she was five, and the best father figure my dad has had, even though his father lived until 1996. He's my second grandfather. But if there was ever any doubt in this man's mind or in his heart that there was a God, and he was a loving and gracious God, and that this God had a son who could make everything all right, he never showed it to anyone. Even his dying is a lesson he's teaching with slow, patient dignity and a quiet sense of humour. I can guarantee you that the first thing he's going to ask if he wakes up is, "Will someone take me outside so I can have a butt?"
I'll miss him when he goes. Chesterfields and all.
I loves me some Mikey. We spent many long hours together in his hospital room throwing butter pats on the ceiling, skate-boarding on his IV pole, and sticking oranges when he found out he was diabetic in high school. That's how they teach you to use syringes--they give you a bag of syringes and an orange. Good times. They took them away when we started playing darts with them. (In return, Mike showed up on my hospital doorstep with a pint of my favourite Ben & Jerry's, his beloved Tigger slippers, and hours and hours of taped X-Files episodes when I had cancer. He let me keep the Tigger slippers, which made me cry. He graduated high school wearing those things. They were legend.)
I also recall one demented evening right after high school graduation when I went back into Mike's room to get something I'd forgotten, after starting the car and taking off my shoes (I drove barefoot in high school. Actually, in high school I did most things barefoot), and I didn't bother to turn the light on because I knew where whatever it was, was......and I knocked over his sharps bucket.
So there's me, whining at the top of my lungs, "Miiiiiikeeeeeeeey! I just dumped a big bucket of syringes on the floor and I can't reach the light switch!!!!!!" and then standing perfectly still in the middle of the room until he heard me and came inside. Where he proceeded to turn the light on and stand in the doorway and laugh his ass off at me.
Mike is also the friend whose father once went to Chincoteague Island in his red VW bus and came back with an auctioned wild pony where the seats had been. True story. We have pictures.
Yesterday I was accused yet again of being a veritable font of useless information. This, when Mom and I spontaneously broke into "The Battle of New Orleans" at the dinner table.
The reason for this is that just as we sat down to the second course, Rocky from next door got out and was seen bolting past our house. Sadly, Rocky is not a poodle, or even a boxer, or for that matter a boxer whose last name is, in fact, Marciano. Rocky is a horse. A miniature horse, to be sure, but still nearly as tall as I and weighing a shitload more, as horses do. So, being me, I immediately kicked into mom's moccasins and ran to the fridge to get a bag of carrots and went to head him off at the pass, as Hedley Lamarr says.
The pass turned out to be the railroad tracks.
Actually, he was being a good little horsey and after his head-up, look-at-me, I'm-running, ha-ha, I'm-free-you-fuckers! was heading as fast as his little hooves could carry him back to Marciano's barn. Sadly, no one told him there were two layers of fence preventing that. So I cornered him down the embankment along the first layer of fence, where he looked like he was about to roll his eyes and charge at me, being of course the big bad stallion that he is (not), whereupon he promptly got a look on his face that said, "You have come equipped with those orange crunchy things!" And walked over to me calm as you please and stuck his horsey little head into the pocket of my shorts, where the bag was. So I grabbed his halter and walked him up and down and up and down and up and down, because there was no way he was standing for any of this holding still business, while the idiot stable hand who'd let him escape in the first place went to go get a lead. He also came back with Barbara, who looked at me and calmly said, "Oh good, finders keepers." Um, no. No thank you, Barbara. Really. But very funny.
So while they were discussing how best to get him back to Point A, Rocky and I looked at each other and said, "Really. Well, we got down here," and I held a carrot back behind me with one hand and the lead with the other (because I had tried this with no lead and the only thing that happened is Rocky stepped on the back of mom's shoe and I thought, "This could get ugly,") and the two of us tromped right on up the embankment and onto the railroad tracks, and then had a lovely stroll home again. I was sorely tempted to bring him to the back porch and say, "Mom, Barbara said I could keep him!" but then realised that Mom was in control of both my wine glass and my legal domicile at the moment.
How does this relate, you ask, to "The Battle of New Orleans"? Because mom asked where I went when I followed Rocky and how did I get him out. And after pointing out "the same way we got in there" we both said, "I ran through the briers and I ran through the brambles......." etc.
Dad was about to hide under the table.
The postscript to this is that after my run this morning (not chasing anything, thank you very much) when I went past the barn, Rocky stuck his head out of his stall and tried to stick his head down my running shorts, thinking I might have more of those orange crunchy things.
Ever been frisked by a horse, even a very short one?
Every time I cut mangoes, I think of Samira's father. Ramesh was a round little Indian man, stereotypical in a lot of ways, jolly but also very soft-spoken, and he spoke quickly and decisively, always sure of his opinions. A few years ago he had a stroke the week of his son's wedding that put him in an irreversible coma. (Next week is the anniversary of his death, which gratefully came before the family had to make any decisions about withdrawing life support and feeding)It was Ramesh who fed me my first mango. It was a little underripe, and so was tart and green and had that strange tingly flavour that green mangoes have. When I demurred at being served the second half of my mango, he castigated me mockingly, "You don't like mangoes? Shame on you! What kind of Indian woman would you be?" This, of course, made us snort with laughter, since we had to constantly remind Ramesh that the reason his wife and I are so pale is because we're both white.A few months later, Samira and I were visiting her grandmother in North Jersey. Mangoes were in full season now, and we brought some with us. Ramesh had introduced Carolyn to mangoes, too, when he first married her daughter. We brought a plate of the fruit into the living room to snack on with our iced tea, and after a while we noticed Carolyn hadn't had any. We asked her if it was still too green for her, and she got a piously outraged look on her face. "It's not how Ramesh cuts them!" Of course, when we got home we were instructed on Ramesh's Official Particular Way to Cut a Mango So that Carolyn Will Eat It.
I brought mangoes to the funeral home instead of flowers. I knew Samira and her mom would know why, even though I felt stupid piling the three fruits onto a table filled with huge arrangements of lilies. Sure enough, when Carolyn was wheeled into the viewing area, she clucked her tongue at my handiwork. "That's not the way Ramesh would have done it," she said softly, moving the mangoes into the casket with him for cremation.
