The Eleventh

Today while driving across town to the SuperTarget, going 20 miles round trip to save $5.00 on milk, I looked into the back seat as Rabbit grumbled about not wanting to be in the car.

“Listen, sister, just close your eyes and snooze while we drive.  We’ll get a treat at the store and be home before you know it.” Rabbit shifted uncomfortably in her seat, the shoulder belt rubbing across her face. 

“I don’t feel good,” she said.  She frequently pulls the sick card when she doesn’t want to sit in the car, or when she isn’t getting her way.  She’d just gotten out of school and her usual routine was disrupted because we were out of milk.  I rolled my eyes.

“Mommy, I really don’t feel good, for real.”

Her face was more pale than usual.  I pushed the button to let her window down, and she gulped in a breath of fresh, sharp 15-degree air before I put the window back up.  It was stuffy in the car, after all.

An hour later, we were driving back home.  I had gotten some quick supper items, but it was still 6:30 when we pulled into the carport.  Rabbit trudged into the house and started vomiting in the hallway outside the bathroom.  I had been putting away groceries when she called out to me, and I found her standing in the bathroom looking alarmed.

“I throwed up!” she wailed, holding out her hands.  I washed her with a cloth, got her water to rinse her mouth, and put her in the shower.

“Oh, Bunny, I’m sorry!” I said.  “You should have told me you were going to throw up!”

“Well, I said I didn’t feel good!”

*sigh*

I read three books this week, and it turned out I read them in the order of how much I liked them, the first being least and the last the best.

First, upon reading a blurb about it in Entertainment Weekly (I know….not exactly the source of reliable literary recommendations), I read A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick.  For a Gothic romance, it was strangely bloodless.  It was reviewed as a complex “bodice-ripper” but I found it to be a stark and depressing version of a story that should have had either less sympathy for its characters (or maybe more?) 

 I can’t quite put my finger on why I was so disappointed in this book, except to say that it built far too slowly to the heart of the plot, slugged along with its descriptive narrative, and in the end had me wishing everyone in it would just die already!  The story is that Ralph Truitt, a wealthy widower in 1907, places an ad in a Chicago newspaper for a wife, and Catherine Land answers the ad and arrives in his Wisconsin town with a past of her own, and shocking plans for their future. 

It doesn’t end quite how one would expect, but for sheer Gothic, bodice-ripping suspense and shockery (is that even a word?) I would recommend skipping this book and instead, read The Crimson Petal and the White by Michael Faber.  I mean, really, if you’re going to go to the trouble of reading a steamy Gothic romance as an embarrassing and guilty pleasure, why not go all out and read one that has 848 pages and weighs almost three pounds?

Next, I read Bloodroot by Amy Greene.   I could not put this book down; it was a very dark and weird story, set in the Appalachians and revolving around Myra Lamb, a girl descended from bewitching mountain women, with “haint blue” eyes and a past, present and future full of tragedy. 

Myra’s story is narrated in the first person by an old admirer, then Myra’s grandmother, then her children, and then by Myra herself.  The vernacular is very authentic, and I could hear the accents in my head while I was reading.  At times, the thematic elements of the story seemed to get in the way or the author seemed to be trying to hard to keep things in the story that just for sheer symbolism, but didn’t really succeed in tying them together.  It doesn’t really matter, though, because the story itself was so powerful and intriguing. 

After I finished this book, I was unsettled and couldn’t stop thinking about it, whereas almost immediately after reading A Reliable Wife I had forgotten the title and the names of the main characters.

Finally, after being recommended by dozens of people, I read The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.   All I can say is you need to read this book.  I was prepared to be depressed by the subject matter: a father whose selfishness and wanderlust and unappreciated brilliance wreaked havoc on his family.  I didn’t think I was in a good place to read it, but I started the book in the morning yesterday and read off and on all day, then woke up early today to finish the last section.  It is riveting, heartbreaking, hilarious and terrific.  My favorite line in The Glass Castle was “…one thing about whoring: it put a chicken on the table.” 

Parts of it reminded me of a less self-depracatingly comical version of Mary Karr’s memoir The Liars Club and parts of it were a little like The Kids Are All Right by the Welch siblings.   After you read it (and then check out the other two I just mentioned), you might also read Daughter of the Queen of Sheba by Jackie Lyden.  And then thank your parents for not being as awful and dysfunctional as the ones in these books.  For eye-opening perspective adjustments, these books are hard to top.

Of course, now I have that terrible emptiness you get when you’re out of new books to read.  Any recommendations?

Seriously?

If you are reading blogs on Saturday night, you need a life.  Now pardon me while I go take out my contacts, put on the old reading glasses and depress myself by reading The Glass Castle.

Three inches of snow overnight.  My parents’ situation (fricking roller coaster).  Work stress.  Tension headaches and (sorry) diarrhea almost every day for two weeks.  I’m holding out hope that spring will be a reprieve from some of this, but for now, it’s just sucky.  Today was not a good day on many different levels, and while nothing catastrophic happened, it was just a day of worry piled on worry.

So rather than be a bummer, I’m going to close this out with the hopes that tomorrow will be better than today.  Every day is a day closer to my goal, and I’m hanging on to that.  When I get to the goal, I’ll share it. Until then, I’m just hanging on.

It’s good to see the old folks finally at home, and back to normal.  Sitting in their easy chairs, enjoying the newspapers.  And Dad is wearing his bluejeans again, after 70 days in hospital gear and pajamas.  Mom is sporting some nice new shoes (along with a nice new recliner!) and they’ve started calling my brother “Jeeves” as he is cooking for them and taking care of their needs every day. 

This system is just for now until some other arrangements can be made for them, but it is such a comfort knowing that for now, for these few weeks or months, they are back together at home.  Whatever comes after, it is this time we will remember.

This afternoon, I picked up Rabbit from the after school program and she held onto my arm as I signed my name on the clip board by the door. She hugged my arm to her thin chest and rested her cheek on my coat sleeve, walking alongside me down the hall and shuffling her feet as she worked to stay as close to me as she could manage.

I looked down at her and smiled.  She tried to keep a solemn face, but I grinned at her and she wiped her hand over her mouth to cover her smirk.  Her eyes got wide and she pulled the corners of her mouth down, before giving up and slyly grinning at me. 

“No smiling!” I said, pulling a serious face.

She glanced around at the other parents down the hallway and then gave me a sidelong glance.  Then she whispered, conspiritorially, one word:  “Toilet.”

As we both burst out laughing, people poked their heads out of doorways and children stopped and stared.  Rabbit just hugged my arm tighter to her, and we kept walking. 

I’m at the end of it. 

I’ve tied a knot and am hanging on, but I’m definitely at the end.

This has nothing to do with my dad or my mom.  My little family at home with me is fine.  It is all related to work and to detail my frustration and anger here would only make things worse.  Suffice it to say that I made a few decisions over the past few days that hopefully will result in a better professional life for me, which will make life a lot easier on the people who count on me.  The ones who matter.

So if you are sending out good karma into the universe, white light, positive thoughts, encouragement, etc., I’d appreciate a spare thought sent my way.  Everyone has a time in their life when they feel like they’re at a crossroads, and I think I’m at mine.

What else do you call it when a man who was supposed to have died three or four times during his hospital stay gets to go home?  It is nothing short of miraculous that my dad is even alive right now, let alone sitting at home in his recliner complaining that it isn’t warm enough in the house.

He is home after going into the hospital on November 23rd of last year.  If you do the math, that is ten weeks in the hospital.  SEVENTY DAYS. 

In that time he had two surgeries and several close calls that had us all convinced that he could go at any time.  Today, he got to go home and Wednesday, my mother will be back from her trip out of town and they’ll be together again. 

And although we’re by no means through this, the fact that he’s back home is something to hang onto.  Thanks to those who kept reading through this ordeal; your support has meant more than I could ever express.

This was a day where everything I had planned just went off the tracks, derailed and irretrievable.

Nothing catastrophic, just a series of postponed appointments, lost keys, missed phone calls and other delays that set back the course of all the plans I had made by hours or even days.

By the time I got home I was incensed and grumpy, and Rabbit decided she wanted to play drums on the Tinker Toy cannister in the living room when I finally sat down to take off my shoes.  I was snappish with her, and the PC stood on the stairs telling me in unwelcome detail about how how was going to insulate the kitchen crawl space, going on and on until my brain shorted out and my eyes glazed over, my dinner growing cold in front of me. 

Some days, it is very, very, very difficult to be nice.  And it usually happens on the days when everyone else is being nice, or having a good day.  And no matter what anyone does, I find myself seething, wondering to myself how it is that everyone in the entire world with whom I am forced to have contact for any amount of time that day can be so incredibly annoying, stupid or clueless.

Then I finally sit down in my office with the door shut after taking a deep breath and I close my eyes for a few minutes before the inevitable clamoring at the door from someone needing to know where the vegetable oil is, or from someone wanting chapstick or a hug, and I calm down enough to know that only someone who is drowning in the riches of a loving family and people who need her could be so cruelly annoyed by it all.  And then I am ashamed.

Because I often think I would like nothing more than to escape all this human contact for a little while, but I know that to be alone and lonely would be far worse.

I got a new office at work; I can’t remember if I mentioned this or not…probably not.  Last week, we did some reshuffling of workspace and just about everyone played musical chairs in one form or another.  After the dust settled, I was in a marginally bigger office, with a big window and extra space for files, clients, etc.

To celebrate, I shopped for a new lamp. I took Rabbit with me after a research shopping trip a day earlier.  She looked at the lamps and chose a little buffet lamp with bead fringe around the edge of the shade.  I said no thanks.  I had it narrowed down to two, and the one I chose (above) made the final cut just because I couldn’t stop looking at it. 

I took the picture with my phone; later, I moved the lamp over to the opposite corner of the cabinet, and it changed the entire feng shui of the office for the better.  I immediately felt more comfortable, just by moving it over.

The framed New Yorker cover on the cabinet is one from the issue that came out the week before PC and I got married, and I loved the cover art that portrayed an old fashioned pen and bottle of ink.  What you can’t see in the picture is that there are constellations of stars in the ink bottle.  I’ve had that picture hanging in every office I’ve ever had as an adult and just love it. 

The bowl is one I got from a friend who was selling candles.  I just like it and thought it would look good in my office. 

The nicest thing is when I leave the lamp on and go out on an appointment, and when I pull up at the office, I can see it in the office window from outside, casting a welcoming glow to me if it is twilight.  The bad thing is that it doesn’t give off enough light for me to get by without the overhead fluorescent, but I’ll eventually get a second lamp for the office to take care of that.

It just goes to show that I’m the type to “nest” wherever I am, and if you’re at work as much as I am, that can help tremendously.