Alecto's Ophelia

South Greeley Avenue

I swear, I have never seen this sign. I want to run out right now, down Prospect to King, to the intersection where Quaker empties onto South Greeley. How could I have missed it? It can't be more than a quarter mile from my house and while I cannot say that I am on a first name basis with every shop in town, at least they applaud when I come in the back door at the hardware store. 

Respect, Ma'am.

Don't ma'am me, I'm only old enough to be your mother, barely.

Laughs: Respect, Woman!

That's a little better but I would have thought your generation would have gotten past this gender shit.

Laughs and laughs and laughs... Respect! Resident of Chappaqua!

Thank you very much. Does this mean no one buys any of this stuff? Why are your doors still open?! (oh, crap, please don't close, I don't know what the hell I'd do without you)

Noooooo - not really laughing at all - people come in for things on a list but residents don't buy these things, generally.

Who buys them, then? You barely knew how to sell me what I wanted and it's not for lack of knowledge on your part.

Honestly, ma'am, sorry, um, uh..

Alecto. 

OK, Alecto, I'm Jim and it's really nice to meet you.

It's nice to meet you too Jim. I love coming in here. You stand in the middle of that middle aisle and grin at me every time and I've never walked out of here without a solution, even if it wasn't what I thought I needed. Do you always stand in the middle of the middle aisle?

Only when someone comes in the backdoor, Alecto.

Jim. The only actual parking that isn't actually full all the time is behind this building.

My point.

Who buys these power tools?

Two types, generally. The first type has just blown his up and has to finish a job and he's pissed too because he could get it cheaper at Home Depot but there IS NO Home Depot. The second type thinks he needs a drill. Or a circular saw, or God help me, a chainsaw. 

OK, so I'm the second type, are we really all that bad?

You're not bad at all and you aren't the second type. 

I'm listening.

You're a unicorn!

Seriously? Did you actually just call me a unicorn?

I love saying that word. No one ever knows what the hell I'm talking about.

Jim, I assure you, I'm not a unicorn. 

Around here, ma'am (with that grin), yes, you sure are. 

Holy crap. If you grew up here you really need to get out, check out, I don't know, thirty miles from here?

That's the city.

It is, indeed. Or you could just head north into New England, do not stop in Fairfield County (we're just harder to find there) but drive until you hit the junction of 95 and 91 and then pick. Go north or go east, it really doesn't matter. There ought to be a big Welcome to New England sign. In small letters it will read: also, you STILL can't get there from here and we do that on purpose because you are all unkind people. Turn back now. Welcome to New England anyway! 

That's too much to go on a sign. 

Not if it's a really big sign and you use a small enough font and people will pull over to read if it's in Helvetica because they'll think they've somehow hit the bible belt and be confused as shit.

You people make your signs with Helvetica?

No. But I wish we would. I will tell you this, though, New York drivers beat Connecticut AND Massachusetts drivers hands down. I've never felt so safe in my life.

Can you write that down? And sign it? Can you write in Helvetica?

No. 

Jim, I have a non-implement of destruction question for you.

Shoot.

Jim, where the hell are all the Quakers? This town did, at one point, decide it was the armpit of all Quakerism, no offense, I like some meeting houses. 

What?

Quakers, Jim, where are the Quakers?

Like an indian tribe?

Are you shitting me?!

Yes I am because that's the most annoying question new people ask. Look it up, they have one meeting house.

Jim, it's Native American. Don't say Indian anymore, OK?

Yes, ma'am.

I'm kidding, you can say anything you want but since we're in the Land of Vegans...

Oh, you noticed that?

Yes, we, my daughter and I, could not possibly miss them. Also, gluten is verboten around here. But what about the Quakers, are they also verboten?

I told you, one meeting house, you can google it.

Jim. Do you think I didn't do that? Do I look like a non-googling sort of person?

Nope.

.....

Oh. You want to know where the Quakers went. No idea. I'm twenty-seven, been here my whole life and we mostly have Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and I think, one Methodist Church.

Jim. This town is rotten with Catholic churches. I live dead center in the middle of the biggest parish in town, New Castle even. I live forty-five feet from the church parking lot. OK, two hundred yards. Maybe. This town cannot possibly support that.

Oh, but it does. We just don't discuss it. 

We?

We who came before the Clintons and all the rest you don't seem to notice because two walked right past you.

A Clinton walked right past me?! Wait, come back!

No. Not a Clinton. They moved out some time ago.

Oh. I did not know that.

It's OK, you wouldn't have noticed them either, I'm pretty sure. 

No! I swear it, Jim, I would have noticed either or them or even the girl.

She never lived here.

Are you sure?

Yup.

OK. 

Jim, can I have those drill bits over there? The ones in the yellow box, yes. Thank you. Mine are crap.

Respect, Ma'am?

Why do you keep saying that? 

Because you use your tools and your paint and you find things to solve the problems in here. You aren't stuck and angry.

Angry? Kid, this is the best place on earth right now. Except for the Quakers. I sure would like to find the Quakers.

Sighs... google the address and I'll see you next Sunday.

Jim. I'm very well behaved at meeting; I just cry sometimes. I know what to do and what not to do and you'll hardly know I'm there. I just need a little peace.

Laughing... well then you'd better get out fast before the coffee's served. 

Would you be referencing the use of the word Jesus twice in every sentence? I noticed the heavy emphasis on the website.

That is exactly what I would be referencing but feel free to flee. You won't be accosted until you get to the coffee. 

Do you go to the coffee? I could come talk to you and we could talk about paint. I like paint, you like paint...

Alecto, I am the guy at the coffee urn saying Jesus every three words.

No shit.

No shit.

This I gotta see.

You said you were respectful.

I never said that, actually, but I am. Always. It's you I gotta see.

Why?

It's just another layer of who you are and you and the waiter at Aesop's who's freaking name I do not even know, are the only people in this town who seem like people. I know that everyone is a person but most people are closed up tight. Over at Pleasantville it's a little more, um, warm and fuzzy.

This is a good town. You'll be OK.

Thanks, Jim, you'll see me one Sunday but don't engage in any theological discussions with me. That should be done at the bar at Aesop's. I'll buy you a Perfect Manhattan. The bartender is astonishing.

I really should know the waiter's name. We have an actual relationship now, the three of us, me, and him, and Elizabeth. We make reservations even when we don't need them just to say we're coming in. And the bartender really is quite something. 

1360

The Blue Moon Orchestra

I still have that dress. It watches for signs of movement from the top of the armoire, as folded as that fabric can get. Side by side, my last pair of shoes rest in the absolute stillness of Savasana, suspiciously free of dust. They are all entirely serviceable; especially the dress, which at that exact moment reached the pinnacle of joy in Floyd, VA on the second Saturday of the month. The photograph, one of several taken by Cielo who blinks and captures wide eyed joy, is dated April 13, 2013. If I sat with it long enough, the caller's name would come to the surface but I don't mind just having the feel of her. I prefer women callers who have accumulated at least five decades, bound by the circumstances of their gender, to men of any age, or younger woman, regardless of talent. These women read a room better than any other, imparting far more than the movement of the dance, spoken or sung. They tell stories of their best selves, their inside selves, their aching, joyful selves to what the room asks of them. The apparent aloofness of Linda L, who died on the way to the hospital last year, spoke to the room persistently of the intimacy of joy. She called three dances, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and then that voice was gone. For me, she was the ultimate story-teller. Nearly unapproachable, to me, she was just one step above the woman who sings in the South and I expect I'd step over nearly any threshold into that safety.      

My right hand rests lightly in the hand of the man I would most likely chase from one small dance to another, from Buchanan where the Railroad dance raises the only dust for miles once a year at the end of July, to Blacksburg and possibly Richmond, and back to Floyd again except for having met his wife. A partner is a hard stop. It did not stop the crush which was exacerbated by the probability of his being the my personal best dance partner ever. Can't be chalked up to the crush because I am not crushing during the dance and I could bullet out the evidence of best in thirty-five reasons of why.

It popped up this morning and I wonder if I'm really going to talk about work at 12:15 today, or the avalanche I rode down, all the way to the bottom of: I cannot walk through those doors. 

At the bottom will be the same ocean everything lands in anyway which makes me wonder if it even matters which story jumpstarts the weekly forty-five minutes of the hard work. The hard work that climbs into the passenger seat to continue the inner dialog for at least the rest of the weekend. Sometimes, like last Saturday, I should just go straight home and be still. Sometimes an hour spent afterward in the chaos of the Mohegan Lake Walmart is enough to compromise my driving. I should know better by now.

In talking with Elizabeth, the subject of, but what does this even mean?! came up and I remembered the concept called, it is just an event. The story we tell ourselves about the event is driven by our circumstances. That sounds harsh but it isn't, it doesn't have to be, it is the possibility of telling ourselves a different story, one that could, if told well enough, change our perception of ourselves and our own personal world. The event is neutral. When I leaned about this, the event that stood face to face with my terror was a rape and how the hell do you neutralize a rape? You probably do not, having all those layers of what you have become, but you can pull apart the pieces, discard what you can, and shift the direction of perception. Yours, in particular. 

This makes me wonder about my anger toward young victims who are protected from the 'triggers', more so by men, I think, than necessarily other women. Men can do such horrific damage in the name of protecting a girl. They feel important, powerful, and God knows what else. I'm not angry with the men though; they aren't my problem (they are their own problems), it is the women who cling to the triggers and cling to the illusion of safety which emanates from our idea of male. I am angered because We are more attached to victim than we are to developing the strength to cope and then to walk again. Those 'triggers' (God, I hate that word), will grow with the accumulated interest that occurs when we hide in the dark. 

GET UP! I want to yell. GET THE HELL UP AND LOOK IT IN THE EYE! You are not doing any of us any favors behaving as if we are broken when maybe the condition called damaged, no matter how severe, need not be fatal. That sort of anger, or rage, is never about someone other than ourselves. Those women are, in fact, one of my more obvious 'triggers'. 

At the bottom of the ocean there is a massive rock. side by side with the old brain, which informs the stories that have that have become life threatening. It grew a lot in fifty-five years but I can see it and I can name it. It is fear and it is epic. It is a monstrous thing with tentacles, imagine a rock with tentacles, and I can't decide if I am severing them one scary bit at a time or if I'm just learning to walk on by.

My friend Lauren reaches out periodically and says, please, please come dance with me! You don't have to go home, you can stay the night and it will be so much easier and even now, this much closer to the city it still feels like a million miles from where I sit. So much pain bubbling up, I tell her about the time I drove all the way in for a big dance, parked, walked into the building, paid for the bracelet and then stopped cold at the open doors. I listened to the siren's song of the music. I watched the dancers on the floor and also sitting on the chairs along the wall, froze in terror, pivoted on one heel and walked right back to the car. Walked with a purpose, a walk identified and called out by my cousin who had just come out or was about to come out of Ranger school and did everything with a purpose.

Lauren tells me other things; an exchange of pain and fear, offering a return to safety that I contemplate periodically. You can come back, she tells, you can come back and climb the hill again. I am skeptical but the obviousness of the dress and shoes sitting on an armoire five feet from the bed is hard to ignore. That I went to such great lengths to find the other shoe during the Weston evacuation, with more urgency than the loss of my favorite pair of flats (my relationship with favorite shoes is somewhat out of proportion), is also difficult to ignore. A giant Maglite hovers over the evidence. 

Fuck off, I tell it, periodically, although I notice every time that I have not removed the evidence.

I particularly appreciate the the Blue Moon Orchestra. And the banjo. And the backup singers. It's an old video, look closely at the mic to her right. I loved, instantly , every single song from this collection, but this one reached out and grabbed me by the hand all the way back in 1994 or 95, back when I still believed I wouldn't be doing anymore dancing at all.

 1297

Six months later

I'm not waking up this morning; something about deciding at 7 PM yesterday that it was absolutely Friday finally, and wishing everyone a great weekend as I walked out of the, um, hair place? with a wig on my head.

i don't have a wig on my head and this morning it just looks like bed head, which means I have approximately 8 minutes to fix it and get the hell out the door. Never mind my makeup; I don't recall when I last touched it. Tuesday maybe. I wanted to look like a grownup. Just Tuesday.

The first thing my kid did, before she walked out the door, was hug the shit out of me. And I love you, Mom. I love you so much.

I surrendered.

When My hair was being attacked yesterday evening I realized that human contact, actual skin to skin, or even more than an accidental bump in an elevator was gone. Mostly. I'm not much noticing but I noticed right then, looking into the mirror at hands with scissors chopping six months of growth and dropping it to the floor. My hair looked orange in the light. 

I surrendered.

I haven't surrendered to leaving the house in 12 minutes though. I'll get to that.

However, I am looking at my daughter, six months ago just seven weeks into dorm life and fear of no friends (and now it is fear of missing out which is FOMO and sounds like something you might catch if you got too close to an open petri dish of unknown origin. I think I'll tell her that. She'll laugh.

I am looking at my daughter, six months ago, who finally received her admittance email (no more letters) from Hunter where she will be in the fall, and despite her sudden gut wrenching fear (FONF), which followed immediately on the heals of 'Mom! I'm literally shaking right now', she will take one more giant leap forward. 

This is the best way to start today, I think. Noticing that I am witnessing a miracle.

Look around. We all are.

Have a fabulous Friday, and when it finally gets here, a great weekend as well. I am off to work and I'll have more to say on that subject later.

Unedited. Entirely unedited. Sorry about that.

385

I saw my daughter in the grocery store...

"Met my old lover in the grocery store
The snow was falling Christmas Eve
I stood behind her in the frozen foods
And I touched her on the sleeve

 

She didn't recognize the face at first
But then her eyes flew open wide
She went to hug me and she spilled her purse
And we laughed until we cried..."

Whole Foods here in Chappaqua puts the flowers right at the entrance. This way your can lose your mind, pick up half a dozen packages, drop them into your basket on wheels and then avoid destroying them while you pick up the six items you came in for in the first place. 

Dan Fogelberg. I miss him. I could rattle off a dozen songs without blinking but probably cry before I got past the fifth. Lucia is a Mancinelli and her grandfather was a doctor, an anesthesiologist to be specific, and he cut a path two hospitals in Stamford, CT that apparently made a significant difference. In the end he retired over a malpractice suit that threw his premiums through the roof and the world lost one of the finest physicians I've ever met at the precipice of our country losing or destroying the very best of our people who once stood with their graduating classes and recited the hippocratic oath. Do no harm.

Dr. Mario Joseph Mancinelli, first generation Italian American, was born in Stamford, CT, sometime between 1915 and 1918 (I'd have to look it up again). My husband's parents were of the same generation of my grandparents; generations overlap in ways we don't consider sometimes. His father took whatever work he could find and in 1915 returned to his homeland to fight because that was what you did; you went back to your roots when your roots called, and then he came home. Dr. Mancinelli had one sister and that was it. Consider this. I have a tremendous amount of respect for a woman I never met. 

But back on Mr. Fogelberg and being a Mancinelli and Whole Foods. Sometime in the early eighties, Lucia's aunt gave her dad a song. I don't know the circumstances, but it stuck. I cannot hear Leader of the Band without thinking about Dr. Mancinelli. He passed at 91 a number of years ago (quite) and my heart still hurts. 

The funny thing about all of this music, that I could rattle off without thinking, is that it's like a string of Christmas lights; not one stands by itself. Maybe it's just me but I don't think so. I think it was the time, the events, and the timing of the releases. 

The Reach is mine. It binds me to that family forever.

And in the flower section of Whole Foods this evening I saw my daughter and I heard Old Lang Syne and it wasn't my old lover and there was nothing lost that couldn't be found but it was right there in all that color... the oranges and purples of her wedding, chosen from her childhood and her family, not out of tradition or convenience, or what might be expected or used today.

She chose Day Lilies (they last 24 hours!) because I found a hill of them, unblooming in the forest and transplanted over five hundred to the front of the house when she was a year old and the following summer the house exploded in orange in June and that is burned into her Cerebral Cortex. She chose Irises because her paternal grandmother, the formidable ER nurse, Mrs Mancinelli, preferred swamp irises to any other flower (swamp irises couldn't be found but we came close). She chose Hydrangea because we have always had it or tried to have it and she chose it in small and green and hopeful. She chose tulips because that is what her husband brought her in the very beginning and brings her still and she added roses because I guess we should always have roses? And she made them be orange. 

And so I took her home and arranged her in a vase and pulled up some Fogelberg and told her how much I love her. 

Which one? Dr. Mancinelli, I think. She is going to be the difference in medicine when she graduates.

 

 

So this happened

THIS is a very big effing deal. She had to get out of Purchase, the question was to where. She could have stayed one more year and it wouldn't have hurt but it wouldn't have helped either because, to quote, "this is my education and my tuition fund and I'm not getting what I want or need". 

The acceptance rate at Hunter isn't awful, I think it's 37% so that's quite viable but we don't know about the Sophomore transfer rate. She applied to every CUNY school that made sense but probably only would have gone to City or out to Queens. It was Hunter that really made sense and at sixteen, when she had to make her choices, nothing made sense. At sixteen she turned up her nose at Hunter because it wasn't Barnard.

How can anything make sense when you're sixteen or even eighteen? What I noticed during application season was that the parental involvement was astonishing. I will tell you what you want and why you want it. And maybe they were on the right track but should it be that way? And what the hell happened to a Liberal Arts degree? (that's rhetorical, I know exactly what happened to it).

Anthropology IS the new Liberal Arts degree. One of them, anyway. Nobody with any sense, says one professor, takes this seriously as a profession. There are exactly 37 tenure spots open in the country right now. Other than those, you starve. He was homeless once, having completed his doctoral thesis in something interesting (I've already forgotten), and not been able to make enough money to pay his student loans and keep a roof over his head. Now he teaches at several universities but still does not have a tenured spot. Of course not.

She never meant to pursue a career in Anthropology. She meant to study something she loved and somehow, within the first three years, figure out what she wanted to do next. In other words, what is worth student debt? Thoughts are percolating and sometimes she speaks and I am very, very quiet because I do not want her to stop thinking and speaking.

When we moved into this house, part of the attraction was the half mile walk to the train station. And we hoped she would need the half mile walk to the train station. And she was afraid, just like the first time, that she wasn't good enough. 

It is always like this, it seems; from the first acceptance letters from French Academie of Ballet and the Manhattan Youth Ballet and then the Bolshoi and finally Ailey. Never enough, but still, always enough.

I do wonder how much good it would do to have a rejection or two. But not so much now, I don't think. A failure or two wouldn't hurt but I'd have to get the hell out of the way for that to happen. 

In June she is going to work at the Hippos-Sussita excavation for three weeks. It is almost as if she does not understand where she is going of what she will see, or have the opportunity to see. She let the deadline for her paperwork nearly pass. She has a scholarship for travel and so only has to take the cost of the trip out of her tuition fund. She needed a physical and the check in hand on April 1. On March 30 she was messing around with the paperwork and said, I can't get a check from Dad for five to eight days. 

My first impulse was to 'fix it'. Just write a check. No.

Can you fill out what the doctor would write, it's just a few sentences?

Forge a doctor's note?! No! Absolutely not.

I was furious. I turned my back and said to the wall, so, you and your father, who controls your fund and was just as aware as you of the deadline, are just going to let this spot go to someone else on Tuesday morning.

Maybe they will hold it.

You know they will not.

Well they might.

OK. 

And walked away.

Mostly the two of them seem to have handled it. Not the medical sentences she needs but the money should arrive where it needs to arrive on time. I have nothing to do with this. Fall or don't fall. You got into Hunter for better or worse. By Spring, 2020, you will pay New York State tuition and the gates will be wide open. I did that and it is no small thing but the rest, all the rest is on you. 

So this happened. This very, very good thing. 

Left of the Lobby

Did you ever watch that FX production, American Horror Story? The second season is titled Asylum and that's where I picked it up, more out of interest to see how long I could stand the train wreck than any real desire to see it or belief that there'd be so much as a single subplot. I expected Freddy Krueger in drag, dressed up like a chainsaw wielding nun.  

Nope. It was Rocky Horror gone to hell sans Freddie Mercury. What it did have was Jessica Lange channeling Kathy Bates, who, as it turned out, showed up in season three. Perfect. Ms. Lange channeled the anger of Green Fried Tomatoes, the dogged lunacy of Misery, and slipped it neatly under the skin of Blanche DuBois. You don't know what you're going to get from that woman, one moment to the next except malice. You can count on inexplicable malice. For no good reason?

I was honestly fascinated and sorry when it was over. I went back for season one when I could, but found it unremarkable and flat. Season three served up Kathy Bates as Resurrected Evil and a seemingly not quite as lethal Jessica Lange charged with the care, feeding, and education of eight or ten young witches forming the coven's next generation. Stevie Nicks showed up as The White Witch, belted out Rhiannon, and probably Gypsy (I'd have to check) and saved a couple of lives. Or corpses. Can't remember and not sure it made a difference.  Overall, fun. Not a disappointment but didn't come close to what Asylum served up and neither did season four with that horrible clown and I threw in the towel. 

Asylum - Fun Fact: located in Briarcliff Manor. Funner Fact: I live one town over (well, I'm in a hamlet, so the town in which the hamlet resides) is right up against Briarcliff Manor. The town of Briarcliff Manor. I was beside myself when I read this tidbit and then, Less Fun Fact: Briarcliff Manor is a building, not a town and it is located two states over. 

I've been thinking lately about why very little mention of my job has come into play. When I saw my quarterly doctor on Thursday, it most assuredly came into play because the last time I saw him I'd just started and while there may have been a couple of instant road blocks, I still had my chin up. I've been through the wringer since that last visit but my experience of the wringer appears to be a bit muffled. I've been meaning to write about my job. It's a huge part of my life these days. All days. My job has been the thing around which I orbit since I was eighteen years old.

And it isn't as if I don't have material. I've got PLENTY of material. Partly I don't understand it but when I think about TheBigBank, I didn't understand that either and it was still easy enough to document in full gory detail just about every horror that popped up over the cube walls. I cried at least three or four days out of five on that thirty mile drive south. I do recall most of this. The posts I wrote were dropped into a Word document, cleaned up, and included in the evidence package turned into HR.

But not here. I do document some things. Mostly I keep copious notes from meetings or events that I'd keep anyway, but kept filed by order of contradictions and ensuing chaos. Other than that I duck and weave and find ways to do my job. I don't cry on my way to work. 

Yesterday I sat down and started to write about my job but when I ran out of time and glanced at the 663 words I'd managed to come up with in ninety minutes (that's a struggle for draft one) I saw a horror show from way back here, outside of the fray, almost. I was trying to figure out what to call it, this place. These were my top picks with the last one occurring as an after fact just before I walked away:

• The Zoo
• The Monkey House
• The House of Pain
• The Asylum

That last one stuck in my head, playing itself out on the twenty minute drive to Adam and by the time I arrived, I had no inclination to discuss my job, but worse, I hadn't given any thought at all to what I was going to work on right now. Effing Zoo! Has stolen oxygen from my life again! Crap. 

The truth is I don't write about my job because the parts that are interesting are drowned out by a battle I just don't understand. Why does my boss hate me? How, to start, do I know that my boss hates me? Body language, tone, behavior which is seriously irrational. I realize everything is subjective but it's hard to miss some of this stuff and when your peers and your boss's peers look at you and say, I just don't understand why she dislikes you so much. Ah, yah, I really don't either. Oddly enough, this doesn't feel even remotely personal. Any tears have been out of frustration. 

It wasn't day two but it wasn't any later than week three when I started to ask who had hired me. Really, who hired me? I ask this because I've yet to find a single person on this team who wants a Release Manager and my manager has cock blocked every attempt I've made to do my job, up to and including confining me to my cube for a week and revoking my right to hold meetings. You'll just have to find a more efficient way to do your job. At one point she asked if I had bandwidth to take on a project and I said yes, because I wasn't able to do most of what I considered my job (I kept looking back at the job description). Those projects were removed almost immediately. It is almost too tedious to describe being asked to do something that another person simply is not going to allow. Fill in the missing pieces on this plan... which requires access to at least one of three people. It is NOT going to come out of my head. I almost got something to UAT but it stopped cold because they really did not have their data issues resolved. I was hauled off that. I don't know when it will go live. None of it is relevant except for the parts where I sidestep the pain and find ways to back channel the things I need to happen. 

There is no way to escalate. She reports to the CIO who's glass office is forty feet from my cube. We have never been introduced and he has never made eye contact. I have been pointedly told by two co-workers to stay the hell away from HR. HR is the recruiter who hired me. She is a recruiter. Not a generalist. There is no reasonable explanation to avoid the recruiter especially if it involves clarification of my department's expectations. When I had open headcount (which has evaporated), I went to see her and nearly lost my head. 

Isolation, anyone?

Elizabeth had to drop something off but her timing had me in a meeting and I had her tuck the object under the staircase below the entrance to the first floor. In order to guarantee-ish accuracy of delivery, I took a series of photographs from the entrance to the building, and like breadcrumbs all the way to the stairwell, down a quarter flight, turn around, look back up and see the door you came in, and then look straight forward and push it back, back, back. You'll be at school on time and I'll only be in this meeting for an hour. Probably.

Sure enough, unmolested, there it was. My lunch. 

Could she have stepped into the elevator and come to the floor, same as me back in October and then again right after Thanksgiving, hopeful and excited? At any other time and place she would have, but not The Asylum. That sounds absurd, also overtly dramatic and funny (to me). I do like to call it The House of Pain. I also like running around stating... 'I have seen the enemy and they is US!', knowing full well I could misquote Pogo all day long and it wouldn't matter in the least. I want to leave Ayn Rand quotes on white boards but I'd have trouble disguising my whiteboard writing. At The Asylum,the way you write, print, and diagram on a white board is as good as a fingerprint. We go through markers the same way we go through espresso pods and the peanut butter flavored granola bars, and the oddly flavored fizzy water. We are well provided for in ways that make no sense. Cut the bananas before you chop bonuses. Or something like that. 

American Horror - Asylum, was about The House of Pain and so, in this context they are interchangeable words and phrases.

What are the primary methods of inflicting pain?

1. Direct Pain -> I beat you with a stick (that's a very direct sort of thing and it's usually a frontal attack)
   
   
2. Indirect Pain -> I make you believe I'm going to beat you with a stick and you can definitely see the stick
   
   
3. Fuzzy Indirect Pain -> I know you're going to beat me for something but I don't know for what or with what even though they might be regularly scheduled meetings (one hour each week).
   
   
4. Gaslight Pain -> Whoa! What's that you say?! Let's walk this back, OK? No? No walking it back? So you did not say release those widgets into UAT even after I made a clear argument for definitely holding off until the next refresh IN THE STAFF MEETING and halfway through my first sentence (but I did get the words, data, and bad, and defects still in QA out of my mouth) you still looked me dead in the eye and said: GET THEM IN UAT AND ACTIVELY IN THE TESTING PROCESS TODAY! Today being a Friday and 'they' being one hundred custom reports without obvious owners that had been completed back in June of 2018 (original writers and BAs long gone) and pulled in and out of UAT so many times I couldn't figure out where they should really be. In the end...WHY ARE THOSE REPORTS IN UAT?! Our data is still in the toilet!
   
    I'm not really going to answer that...this is the way we play here
   
   ...don't stalk S...why hasn't S been supported?!...S doesn't need to hear from you (S calls me or shows up at my cube every three seconds because she wants support)...why are you stalking S? I haven't left my cube. Are you calling every five minutes? No. But I do answer the phone. Are you sending too many emails? I don't think so. I sent the link to the UAT reports with access instructions. That's too long. (in my head, K, what the hell is wrong with you?)
   

To be fair, there have been a few moments when I've put my face in my hands, leaned down toward my keyboard, and muttered

WE DON'T FUCKING CRY ABOUT SHIT LIKE THIS.

Inevitably, Kilmousky (yes, I really do call him that) walks by on his way to The Lair and asks, are you ok?!

The first time: NO, KILMOUSKY! I AM NOT OK!

Every time after: Of course, Kilmousky, why the hell would you ask that?

EXCELLENT! YOU ARE ADAPTING!

So I can't call it The House of Pain. I can, however, call it The Asylum with the above explanation.  I really did want to call it The Zoo or The Monkey House but I think those have to be reserved for individual groups.

When my very favorite lunatic fired me, that might have been week three, all red in the face and yelling in a conference room about a question I asked (purely technical) that hit a hotspot a mile wide, it was easy to forgive him.

When I found out that one of the project managers (different department thank you god) was actually recording meetings on her phone without informing the room, I was horrified until I realized this is what it had come to for her, the only way to walk back the continuous contradictions that inevitably end in... I never said that, what I said was...

I'll resort to email which will flood the already full inboxes but it's hard to argue with a summary that ends with...

If I have misstated or left anything out, please reply to all with corrections as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience and support!

(Alecto the Terrible)

When I take K (not Kilmousky, K) out of the equation and even the inability to interact with her boss, I really do like my team very much. Even when they fire me. Even when they yell at me (or is that in my general direction? ok, I don't like you so much but I can live with you). Even when they refuse to speak to me for three weeks (I'm sorry, I'm not your admin). Even when they may or may not have thrown me under the K bus now and then. I understand why. It's not personal. 

And there is always Kilmousky, who has one of the brightest, quickest minds I've ever had the benefit of interacting with. And there is The Lunatic, my BFF, my Work Husband, who is the only other person that comes close to being Kilmousky's equal. He can fire me anytime he has the need. And there is the contractor who has an undergrad degree in rocks and jocks or something like that, because, he tells me, he didn't really have the grades to do anything else and somehow he's come to this company and not just picked up SQL, but immersed himself in the complexities of two separate data warehouses and the intricacies of global insurance and reinsurance data and data sources that integrate in continuous rivers to the boiling ocean that is us. 

Sounds like it should be big data, yah? Not so much; commercial insurance policies don't produce a lot of transactional data, just big dollars, but the chaos in which it comes to us sure does make it behave that way. 

I do not fear Left of the Lobby but for as many hours of my life that it eats, it is no longer the center of my universe. 

Let's just see if I can keep it that way.

The focus and precision of a well made-life

My father made them in a shaker full of ice and something, something, something, and a small bag of powder, the size and shape of unflavored Kool-Aid. I don't remember what the shaker looked like but I can hear the sound it made. Shake, shake, shake and pour. Maybe I imagine the shake, shake, shake and it was really the chop and whir of a Waring blender. I mostly remember the metal ice cube trays with the lever at one end to break them all apart and they sat on the counter melting individual sheathes of wet. The better to slip you out, my dear. 

S likes maraschino cherries but I remember plucking whiskey flavored orange slices flecked with bits of foam from the bottom of New Hampshire Thanksgiving highball glasses and chewing them halfway through the rind. I dropped them back, more or less into the appropriate glasses, and went looking for the next.

I don't know if my mother cared what floated in the mix or not. She may have been more interested in the sweetly sour unexpected bite and the crunching of the ice and the high probability of being left in peace. You can hide behind a glass because once you have been provided with something, it is nothing at all to pull a Cheshire Cat. Grasp the drink in one hand and the magic token in the other and, poof! A floating cocktail and the low hum of satisfaction infused relief.

I am not a cocktail person. Even when it was de rigueur to order a drink while perusing the menu, allowing actual time to peruse the menu, I generally ordered the glass of wine I was going to drink with my meal which induced premature meal decisions when the Male holding the Credit Card with the Highest Limit said, wait! don't order that, we'll get a bottle, quick, everyone, what are you having, shall we order red or white? My brother will do that to this day, mostly because he can't abide the drinking of inferior wine if it can possibly be avoided. 

it's real for him, let it go

It started with a 750 ml bottle of Ketel One Vodka that had been in the freezer for eight years, purchased for the purpose of Bloody Marys on the dock of the rented cabin on Bucks Island in the middle of Lake Placid. In the week we were there in 2010, I might have consumed a quarter of that bottle (apparently, not very many Bloody Marys). I think I consumed another half immediately following with Florkow and then it vanished into the back of the freezer until the Chappaqua evacuation began. 6.32 ounces. What to do?

And three bottles of Rosies leftover from Lucia's shower (Gak). 

Google.

Gak. Try again

A lime. A little simple syrup. And I mean, really, just a little simple syrup. 

Holy shit, that's good. 

Later I bought a bottle of gin when we officially moved in and another bottle of Vodka and I perfected the cocktail, using measuring cups and tablespoons until I was absolutely certain and then free pouring until I was absolutely certain what not to do. I have a limited window of experimentation before I have to start dumping them down the sink. Think of it like a wine tasting. If you actually swallowed all those glasses... 

When I got tired of the measuring cups and tablespoons and the leaking ten ounce thermos for a shaker and my fingers to strain what remained of the ice, I marched myself off to Bed and Bath or something like that and found what I needed to just get on with it. And then I found out what happens when the top freezes to the bottom if you jam it on too hard and shake too long. Now I just use the strainer at the top and a dishtowel to keep my hands from freezing to the shaker and I actually own what look like a cross between a martini and a margarita glass. They hold approximately six ounces, eight if you're insistent, and ten if you're willing to make poor choices. 

I discovered something else. Rotgut is not for making cocktails. That is a myth. Cocktails are for disguising rotgut. A halfway decent Gin goes a long way to making a first class Gimlet. Dispense with the Rosies and don't order it in a bar where you think they might not have simple syrup on hand in the refrigerator or be prepared to sweetly ask to have lime only, no Rosies, no sugar and apologize to the bartender for fucking with her (or his) cocktail because that is what you're doing. Better just don't do it. 

I don't know how the whiskey sour made its way to the surface but I was standing in the Walgreens parking lot looking in the direction of the Wine and Spirit Shoppe I cannot afford to enter and entered anyway. My phone told me very clearly that a whiskey sour is made with Bourbon. I did not believe my phone. I asked my phone several times and came up with the same answer. My phone also informed me that there were egg whites involved. Wot? 

I went back to focusing on bourbon. I do drink bourbon in moderation and I do have a taste for the stuff but I would not classify it as whiskey. A note on this; Scotch Whiskey, is a regional thing and is made from malted barley. I can call it a single malt if it is a single malt and I cannot call a single malt made anywhere other than Scotland scotch. I have to call it single malt whiskey. Confusing, yah. Bourbon is made in Kentucky, mostly, and is made from corn. See the difference? It is called Bourbon Whiskey, this is true, but I don't think of it that way. Brown alcohol distilled from corn is a very different thing than what we get from malted barley and then there is rye and now I am convoluting things. 

Here is a thing I would not do. I just would not do this. I would not take a single malt and put lemon juice, simple syrup, and ice in the mix, add the affront of egg whites, and then shake the shit out of it and pour it in a glass. I'd be afraid everything from knowing what I'd done, to understanding the bastardization of the alcohol, to the god Gambrinus (he's beer) coming out of the cave to smite me on general principle. 

Ah, wait. I might do that with the Cape Breton stuff. God, that was awful.

In the end I walked out of there with a bottle of Makers Mark because I figured if it turned out to be a disaster, I was OK with having it on the shelf and also, I could always go back for the Jamesons which I do like, and ask them what I had to do to get my hands on a bottle of Bushmills. 

The first try was a disaster. I don't recall if I left out the egg whites (probably) but I do know I cut the sugar in half because I did that with the gimlet and liked it much better. What I got was a very lemony bourbon. I did not finish it. I relegated the Makers Mark to the pantry shelf and decided I'd see about acquiring something that started out as a barley.

I figured I owed the Makers Mark one shot at the real thing in light of the number of times my phone insisted on one specific incantation and worse case I'd be down two shots of Bourbon, some lemon and simple syrup, and half an egg white. The cat would be delighted. I was appalled at what went into that shaker.

• Two parts decent sipping bourbon (the rule is like cooking, if you're not willing to drink the wine, don't cook with it)
• One part FRESHLY SQUEEZED lemon juice
• One half part American simple syrup (that's a 1:1 ratio)
• One half part egg white (hint, whisk it a bit with a fork before you try to pour it into a shot glass)

Pour all parts into a cocktail shaker over ice and shake the shit out of it. I timed myself the other night and I think I shake for about half a minute, maybe less, but not much less. 

This next part is kind of important. Cocktail shakers often come with two types of strainers. There is the flat thing with the handle you hold over the bottom half of the shaker as you pour which colds back the ice and catches any large bits you don't want in the glass. The top of the shaker may also have a built in ice strainer with larger holes which will let out quite a bit more. 

Use that. Let the foam out. You want the freaking foam. It's up to you on the ice. There won't be a lot left if you don't start out with too much (please don't start out with too much, you'll end up with nothing but alcohol soaked ice) and if you shake long enough.

When you've let it all out, give it a good shake, turn it back over and gentle remove both tops. Strain out the rest of the foam. 

I set it on the table and admired the froth. I wished for a cherry and decided it was OK the way it was. I took a picture just in case it was the last one I ever made (entirely possible I wasn't going to have any of this egg white business), and then I took it into the living room and sat down to continue working through thirty-six years of filed crap. 

The amalgamation of smell, froth, the first spill into my mouth, and the token that comes with the glass blurred the room and pulled back the fallacy of time. The sound, shape, and smell of my father filled the void. 

He was twenty-eight or thirty but no more than thirty-two, and the metal ice cube tray was melting puddles on the kitchen counter and his hair was kept cut close and I know the world says he butterflied in his thirties and his hair got longer and he was a very handsome man but the truth of that metamorphosis is partially a lie. We all evolve from something, for better or worse and I think it's best in most cases to just take off the good bad because that's a subjective judgement about a person, not about an event and it clouds who and what we can see.

I have some very intense memories of my father with his hair cut short and a very different experience, retrospectively on who he was. I have the puzzle pieces of his history in the envelope we collect that sort of thing in which cannot be pinned down and so it changes depending on who's around to tell the story or who changes their minds or what you remember, need to remember, or need to not remember. 

When we are going to lose someone, is it better to know that you're going to lose someone? I think so. When we are going to lose someone, can we see them differently, maybe more clearly? Can we push through the layers of history which is not just us but everyone and everything that's passed through our shared concentric circles?

Maybe it is only a concoction of those puzzle pieces. A more vulnerable time in my dad's life, a more hopeful time; the time before he broke himself against the rocky outcrops of his own life. A time before he'd crossed his own boundaries, sold off too many parts of himself to find his way home, a time when he believed he could be invincible, if he just worked a little harder. 

The Whiskey Sour was my dad's drink. It might have belonged to someone else before and/or after but it was my dad's drink. Later he drank Manhattans but that might have been after his dad died; I'm not really sure. The Manhattan was Grandpa Jack's drink. 

The Whiskey Sour is my dad. 

In truth, the quality of the content isn't nearly as important as the focus, precision, and attention to what is supposed to be in there, even if it comes in a packet. 

I take the man in the kitchen and the man in the mountains who struggles mightily to hold onto the truth and precision of things and I pull them together and make a tesseract. So many things fall out of the box, unnecessary things and self-inflicted shackles. Here is one man, with focus and precision, insisting on a well-made life. I see the raging fire and I see the embers in a belly which have not gone out, but I beg them silently to burn, burn, burn with focus and precision until they are all used up.

I make another Whiskey Sour and cry for thirty minutes in a mostly dark room, and then I sip the glass of comfort and get on with it. 

The Last Dog

None of this is a surprise but that doesn't make it any easier; we didn't come into this cottage with the expectation of bringing her with us. Somehow we sweet talked her in with a few charming photographs, none of which showed this demonic face which does not say, oh, gosh, I'm so happy, Mom! It says:

ohmygodimsofuckingfreakedouuuuuutttttt......

All we did was put a raincoat on you, kid, and you're panting hard enough I'm thinking you might pass out. But you're cute so we pose you at the door and take your picture and only we three, you, me, and Elizabeth (and probably the cat that owns you) know the truth.

The truth is this... adult dogs prone to separation anxiety to begin with, don't do well with change. Change of any sort. Elizabeth stayed with her for nearly six weeks. She was almost never alone. We gave her Benadryl in small doses when it got really bad. She learned to poop and pee on command exactly when and where commanded because pooping and peeing on a leash on the clock for the most part was the new way of life. Watching her family scoop it up into a scented biodegradable earth friendly bag (seriously?!) was mortifying. 

She was always a howler under trying circumstances and by trying I mean, she's in her crate and we're in the driveway and I always did wonder if she howled when we left and we just didn't know. I wondered if we just got away with it because we were too deep in the woods to bother anyone too terribly.

The first time I heard her do it she wasn't more than eight months old and I thought to go in the house and call the police because someone in the neighborhood was shaking a baby to death only there wasn't anybody within half a mile with a new baby. There wasn't anybody on the circle with a kid under three, best I could tell. Who the hell WAS that?

My dog. My dog making a sound that dogs only make from the pits of hell when they are no longer really dogs. I went in the house and yelled at her.

Shut. Up. You!

She wagged her whole body.

No. Seriously. I mean it. Stop that. 

Wag wag wag. 

Out the door and more yodeling from the pits of hell. We got in the car and left.

Later she did this sort of thing when we came around the circle and had to pass Bosco. Why Bosco? Not a clue. But Bosco every single time. Eventually we just picked her up and ran until she stopped. One night I came home and found the tray of the crate ten feet across the floor. What the hell? How did she even do that? Not a clue. I looked down at the bottom of the crate and realized the catch that stops the plastic tray from coming out was broken. It wasn't broken when I left. She's never ever even broken seventeen pounds. Huh. 

One night I came home and the green variegated marble tile in the one and a half story foyer glittered with diamonds under the chandelier. 

What the hell? What IS this? I bent down and ran my fingers over the glitter. Sticky, but evenly sprayed. Cats cannot do this and I don't have a male cat anyway and it has covered, more or less, an eight by ten foot floor. Evenly. How? What?

I sniffed my fingers. 

NO!

Dog pee. How?!!

Wag wag wag. The crate tray was across the floor and it was damp. Ish. Sure. There wasn't anything left in it. The sticky diamonds were all over the floor and desk and the back of the couch. And under the couch. I'd only been gone four hours or so and that dog has a bladder that can go over twenty-four hours and we know this because we made a terrible, terrible mistake once. Most times we know she can go twelve to fourteen easy but we don't like to do that. Four hours which followed an 'out' is a serious temper tantrum. Hot damn. The dance she must have done in that puddle had to have been epic. I picked her up and dumped her into the tub. You had to know this was coming, right? You're covered in pee, I'm covered in pee, the house is covered in pee and somehow you're getting the first washing up. 

The dog is a known rager. 

She does not need to be in the crate. Periodically we have left her out of the crate but I decided a few years ago that was a bad idea because of two things. 1. if she got scared or upset then her temper tantrums could happen literally anywhere (the puddle in the middle of my bed was not much appreciated) and 2. it just pissed me off to no end that the first thing she did was jump up on the couch and SHE KNOWS THAT'S NOT FUCKING ALLOWED GODDAMMIT DOG!

1. The dog is a pusher of envelopes.
2. The dog is and always has been neurotic.
3. The dog is batshit crazy.

The dog is also sweet as hell and regardless of the flying leaps down a flight of six stairs on her way to eat the UPS guy (which resulted in landing on her back, smashing her head into the door, and looking more or less foolish), she's never been even remotely aggressive once she's right up against someone or some thing. She barks at me coming in the door and she knows damn well it's me. If she can hear the UPS truck coming around the corner, she knows it's my car in the driveway. Especially if the howling starts up because I sat in the car too long. 

But she's sweet as hell and she genuinely likes everybody which, I think, is rare in any living, breathing creature. Despite the three points above, the dog has a lot going for her.

Except she's a terrier and god knows I can't stand the damn things. If she'd been the ratter I needed her to be, I might have been more forgiving of her sins but the one thing I can't abide in a dog is a complete unwillingness to accept my alpha status. It's only going to cause you pain, love. My bed might be wet one time, but you, sweet girl, forever in the crate. 

And still, we took her with us. Why? OK, here's why:

1. Rehoming her was going to be a very touchy sort of thing to do. If you rehome a dog you have to agree to take the dog back. I can't very well do that if I've moved into a no dog home. People are weird around here. Maybe they're weird everywhere but around here they're batshit crazy. Sorry. They are. Pets are NOT people. Not. Not. Not. People. That's not the weird part; it's the preface. There are a lot of rescued dogs and thousands of dollars, the more the better, apparently, are pumped into these pooches in the name of making them utterly healthy. I'm still trying to figure out why you put a ten year old Chow on life support, but OK, I'm gonna let that one go. Here's the weird part. I've seen people turn on their fur children in the blink of an eye. The shit BIT me! The shit bit my child! (neighbor's child can be bitten, that's fine). Well, yeah, biting is bad but you knew it was a biter when you took it. Full disclosure. And still you let your kid pull that shit. I do get it about the biting though. Biting is a problem. The deep sigh... Cherry's bowels are a disaster and my carpeting is never going to be the same and oh my god my couch! We can't do this anymore. No crates. Crates are bad. So there's that.
2. No one in the family could or would take her. For a minute we thought yes, and then we realized no. 
3. We really didn't want to give her up. She was our dog. That's the bottom line when it comes right down to it. 

And in my head I know what the end result is going to be. 90% certain, but I'll take the 10 and run with it.

The crate was a problem in the kitchen but it was probably the only thing keeping her head glued on. It didn't fit and it was getting really old. The crate belonged to Homer which made it as old as Elizabeth. We decided to put the crate away and confine her to the kitchen during the day. I didn't want to chance the house because the first week we were here she'd marched herself upstairs and dropped a massive pile in the middle of my room (it is ALWAYS my room) not ten minutes after a thirty minute walk during which I could not convince the dog to shit. She did OK for the first couple of days but we could tell it was making her nervous. On about day four she started leaving messages on the mat in front of the door. Great. We took the mat away. So she left them on the rug in front of the sink. Shit! That has to be spot cleaned. So we took the rug away and she literally covered the kitchen floor. It's a small kitchen but still, she's a very small dog. She had to work at that. 

I went to Petco to look at crates and decided a soft sided portable crate was probably the best bet. I brought it home, erected it right where the larger crate (not larger by much) used to be, unzipped the door and asked her to enter. 

No fucking way.

Leafy, get the hell in the crate.

No fucking way.

I threw some doggy bacon in. She thought about it and stuck her head in. Couldn't reach. Stuck her feet in and ate the bacon. 

Good girl. Now, please, get the hell in the crate. 

She got in the crate. I zipped up the door and unzipped the top and fed her more bacon. Then I let her out.

This was fine for maybe a week and then I got a photograph from Elizabeth not five hours after I'd shut her in the crate. She'd chewed right through the canvas and let herself out. Got up from her bed in the living area and greeted Elizabeth, wag wag wag.

Holy shit. 

I went back to Petco and purchased the same crate I'd put away except this one was in much better shape. 

And

I put it in the Harry Potter room. I put a crate cover over the top but not over the front or the side away from the wall. I wanted to protect the wall and the cats in their private place. She could see out the side and see out the front and the air circulation was in no way compromised. The cover was securely fastened; not because I thought she'd do anything to it but because I thought I'd do something to it moving the thing about.

When I got home the crate had moved forward a good fifteen inches and the crate cover was gone. GONE.

Holy shit.

Later, when I pushed aside the privacy curtain to scoop the kitty box, which is a daily requirement since they can no longer go outside, I found the crate cover. 

Holy shit.

That crate bounced back a good two feet and then bounced all the way forward so that's a total of two back and forth and then more than a foot forward. The cover got left behind in the kitty place and I have no idea how but I do know this:

That crate is on tile and that tile floor is directly above our landlords' kitchen. Directly above it. When the crate was on the other side of the kitchen, I think she might have been over a pantry or the actual wall between the pantry and our very small part of the basement. But not that day. That day she was right over the kitchen. 

Fuck. My. Life.

They might both be a bit hard of hearing but they sure as shit are not stone cold deaf. 

The agreement was this: The moment you are bothered you will tell me and I will put that dog in my car and bring her straight to my older daughter.

That was the agreement. The agreement was that she had a place to go with little to no notice. They only had to say one word. I asked the realtor if they would speak up or would they let it fester and he said, oh no, you will hear about it immediately.

Fuck. My. Life.

The next morning I put her in the crate and drove almost to the end of our little road, far enough to convince her that I was gone. Then I got out of the car. From a football field and one hedgerow away I could hear her, the shrieking, howling, and worse, the banging. I ran as fast as I could, hauled her out of the crate, slapped on the leash and retrieved the car. I sent an email alerting my team and director that I'd be working from home.

I have to surrender my dog today.

I set to work until 9:45, 15 minutes before the SPCA opened. I had decided not to call. I put my dog in the car and watched her come unhinged. She's never much cared for the car but this was over the top. I had to leave her in the car at the shelter so I parked as far away as I could, just to give her some peace. Gone were the days when I could leave her in a parking lot for ten minutes and she'd be perfectly happy when I returned. 

I marched myself stoically through the front door. They were busy. A very nice boy looked up from whatever he was very busily doing, gave me a bright smile and asked how he could help me.

And I burst into tears.

Ihavetosurrendermydog I can't I can't I can't I'm so sorry I'm so sorry I'm so sorry and completely incoherent and a woman took me away and asked me some questions and then some more questions and she was very, very honest with me and I wanted to throw up between my feet. She went to speak with the managing director and I worked on breathing. I couldn't hear my dog. This is a good thing, I thought.

No, I'm sorry, we can't take her. This is a no kill shelter and any dog we place we have to take back. It's hard enough to place senior dogs

(since when is Leafy a senior dog?! my dog is not old! She's she's she's, um, ok, she might be, um, past middle age but she's healthy and sound. Ish)

But when dogs suffer from separation anxiety it gets worse when they get older and it sounds like this has been escalating.

Yes, it has been. 

Listen, I can hear your dog from the front office and you parked all the way in the back, didn't you?

Oh my god. Does she sound like she's in hell?

Yes, that's what dogs sound like when they think they're going to die.

Oh my god. I parked all the way in the back so she wouldn't be bothered by passing people or other dogs and I probably made it worse.

Nope. That probably helped. 

What do I do? I can't take her home. I have until 8 AM Monday morning to figure out what to do with her because I can't keep working from home either. 

Her face said, I don't want to tell you what you already know. She handed me The List with four names circled and numbered. PAWS was first on the list. I already knew she didn't qualify at PAWS and said so. And the other three? Unlikely, she said. Pointing, that one has eight beds and I know it's full but it doesn't hurt to try.

I looked at her, took a deep breath and said

And the rest of them are kill shelters, aren't they?

Yes. 

Holy fuck. I don't want my dog to die in a kill shelter. 

Try PAWS. Try it anyway.

I stopped by my office to pick up my power cord and let them know I'd be working from home the remainder of the day while I tried to figure out what to do. I left my dog at the very edge of the lot with a note that read:

This is my dog leafy. I left her here at 11:15. The car is warm and I will be back by 11:30 Leafy suffers from extreme separation anxiety and she's probably screaming right now so please leave her alone. If you really feel that you need to talk to someone, please call me. 555-0103

At 11:23 my fucking phone rang. SERIOUSLY? DID YOU READ THE NOTE OR JUST THE PHONE NUMBER? GET AWAY FROM MY DOG! 

The freakish twenty-something from hell was standing with her face up against my window talking at my howling dog and holding her cell phone out. She put the cell phone back to her ear and yelled, can you hear that?!

She was talking to the local police. I know this because she said so. I know this because I grabbed the phone as soon as she said so and stalked off where I could hear. I asked if a law had recently been passed about leaving animals in locked cars for 15 minutes if the car was warm or if the car was cool depending on the circumstances. The answer was no. I asked if there were any laws I didn't know about regarding stalkers of animals within private property. He said something about harassment. I walked back to the freakish thing and said, he wants to know if I want to press harassment charges. I don't really have time to do that but if you don't get the hell out of here I'm going to have to and I am NOT in a good frame of mind today. 

She took her phone and left. I got in the car and burst into tears. My dog crawled into my lap and quivered. Please don't shit on me, kid.

At 1 PM I called her CT vet and explained what had happened and said

I need Dr to put her down tonight or tomorrow. It has to be before Monday morning because I cannot have her die in a kill shelter. I just cannot let that sort of suffering happen. She can't take anymore of this and neither can I and my landlords are definitely not going to put up with it.

And then the damnedest thing happened.

Will you give me an hour?

What?

Give me an hour. Just give me an hour. I have a friend who has a friend... just give me an hour...

Which turned into a conversation an hour later with the friend who had a lot of friends as it turns out who said, can you give me until tomorrow morning? Can you just give me the night?

Yes. Yes, I can. I'll do anything you need me to do.

And in the end we took our girl back to the vet with a very large check made out to a no kill shelter and bought her the very next bed to open up. In addition we promised five hundred pounds of dog food upon acceptance to said bed. In the mean time, the tech with the friends had talked the owner of the practice in allowing Leafy to have free room and board at the vet's kennel until the bed opened up. In the mean time, the original tech, the just give me one hour tech, and the tech with the friends, took ownership of my dog. I surrendered to one of them, I don't recall which, it doesn't matter really. They would have taken her home but tech #2 was already fostering eight dogs and tech #1 lived in a no dogs apartment. 

Two days later I got a text from tech #2. We found her a home. I have a friend who takes on hard to manage older dogs and his last dog died in November and he's ready to move on to the next adult adoption. The last guy was an out of control Mastiff and he had no trouble with him at all. He met Leafy and they love each other. He understands about the screaming. The only thing is, can you bring another check for her medical bills and we'll give you back the original? 

Yes. Yes and Yes. 

This is the sort of adoption where we don't ask to see pictures or hear updates or have visits because it's better to cut it clean. It's better for us and it's the only way the dog is going to survive it. She has to forget inasmuch as a dog will ever forget. 

And Mike says, plus one for humanity and I say, plus four by my count and who knows how many more in the background that night, all night long by the sound of it.

Phones rang and other phones rang and other phones rang because somebody wanted to save the dog that the sobbing, incoherent woman called about; asking at 1 PM on a Friday if somebody could please take a few minutes in the next half day or two to humanely end the life of her perfectly healthy, very much loved and thoroughly batshit dog. 

So there's that. 

Perpetually underestimating the LOE on that...

It is not 20 years, it is 36 years. Eight bankers boxes and a few other large boxes full of STUFF to be sorted: recycle, shred, refile.

This means read it all, more or less.

This is where I've been. More or less. That's not my photo, by the way. My shit is in boxes shoveled under the drop leaf table. I wrote 400 words yesterday before I ran out of time and I have absolutely none of that today but here is this anyway.

The ledge is no longer a ledge. It's entirely abyss and I'm hanging over it and it's freaking nauseating but I appear to have a rope so that's good. All non-essential systems are still on minimal power and that's still fine. 

Christ. On. A. Bike. 

The stuff you learn when you read stuff you yourself did not file. Holy crap. David, you pissant. 

Oh, wait, hold on, there's this one thing (of so very many). 

First, all these years I believed I sat for the GED the moment my class graduated in June of 1982 and I could (State law, really, really stupid state law). Thinking about this now, that would have been virtually impossible. I was in the throes of basic survival. Eighteen years old, roof over head, car running (get to jobs), food in belly, keep self healthy enough to avoid needing antibiotics (no clinics yet, just an uninsured trip to a doctor). Maslow's hierarchy. Getting that GED handled was not on that list. 

May of 1983, that is when I finally got myself sorted out. I do wonder what prompted it though. If I looked at the match books in the Box of Things, I expect it was in the blank space between disengaging from my high school boyfriend and that first date with my first husband. Something about being truly on my own.

The results are astonishing; not that my scores are so much higher than the state average (of course they are, I was from a fairly privileged demographic despite having home life that might not have been conducive to surviving the academic box). Here, I'll show you. You can read it, think about it and see if you can pick out what doesn't quite make sense unless you're a new reader and then it won't mean a damn thing so skip this part until the very last part which is kind of awful.

Look at the low score. How is that even possible? Look at the high score. Those things go hand in hand and my reader's vocabulary was at a post graduate level according to my self-assigned advisor (Junior year English teacher) and my use of it was extraordinary. When I could be bothered. I was a little tired of getting laughed at for 1. mispronouncing half of what came out of my mouth and or 2. being asked, what?! what does that even mean?

Look at the high score again. It should not have been that high. I wasn't reading the assigned material during my senior year, I was reading and had been reading what I pulled off my parent's selves. I didn't question it at the time.

How can my math score POSSIBLY be higher than language? Did someone else take this test? 

Social Studies. What do they mean by Social Studies? Social Studies ended in sixth grade and as a matter of fact, I did quite well with the subject. Science. Define, please. For that matter, go back and define math. Sixth grade? Sixth grade is when I fell off the map. Up until then math was a most awesome thing unless you count fourth grade but I recovered in the fifth year. I didn't recover from what Mr. Szabo did halfway through sixth grade though. At least not until I signed up for calculus in college for no good reason other than I needed it and as an unmatriculated student no one looked at my prereqs. I didn't meet them by several years worth of math. I believe the last course I completed was Freshman Algebra for the hopelessly inept which took three semesters to complete and then might have had some remedial geometry (which I secretly loved) tacked on second semester sophomore year and THAT was that.

I barely survived the first week of calculus and got myself a tutor. He left hight school at sixteen, didn't even bother with the GED. Three men from a branch of the government that predates the NSA showed up at his doorstep when he was fourteen or fifteen and said, ma'am, we need to have a word with your son. He got me over the hump in two weeks and suddenly math was magical again. 

But not when I sat for the GED.  How is this possible?

OK, here you go.

This cannot be difficult. I circled all the relevant parts. 

So I get it about literature. I'd already read literally everything that would ever have been assigned in 1967. Everything. The rest of it, short of language? Well, in a lot of ways we have bumped up our expectations of math and science. Way up. And I still don't really know what's meant by Social Studies but maybe in 1967 that's really how it was all lumped together. I don't think we had the selection of class choices we have today in high school. I don't even think we had choices like we have today as undergrads until maybe junior year. I think Social Studies is just that. I think it's the study of who we are and how we interact as a culture or cultures. History would be a very big part of that. US History was a requirement in the fifth grade and again in the eleventh. 

Language. How much language was colloquial language on that test? There is a significant difference between the language of literature and the colloquial language of a time period. They definitely overlap but if you can't pick it up in context or suss it out by the root, then you're fucked. You need more context than a single sentence, I'm afraid. That's really the only explanation I have for language. 

But 1967, holy shit. I realize that in 1983 it was only a sixteen year old test, however, the world had moved on significantly in those sixteen years. The world had turned on its head. The educational system, its requirements and standards had made several abrupt left turns leaving the sixties and early seventies in the dust. Our expectations of our children sky rocketed from, maybe you will go to college, to you MUST go to college or you will not survive in this world.

Connecticut has never done much with its infrastructure. Our state schools are comparatively god awful and expensive on top of that, unless you count UCONN and UCONN might as well be a private college with the tuition that goes with it. Our social services have dropped from bad to, you're kidding, right? And our highway system hasn't had an upgrade since. Um. Shit. I've been here since 1970 and I'm not really sure. I think we've widened a few and we straightened out the curves on the Merrit Parkway and we took away the tolls in Southern CT but that's about it. We still only have Interstate 95 running from Greenwich to the Road Island border, 84 cutting across the corner of New York into Mass, and the beginning of 91 in New Haven that runs, probably right up to Canada but I've never really checked. The few spurs that widen and get up to 55 mph for a stretch or two, like routes 2 and 7 and 8 and something in the northeast corner are for intrastate travel. We really are the beginning of 'you can't get there from here'.

So, what's the date of the current GED test and how is it administered and would I pass it today?

I scored a 455 out of 500 on that test without blinking, which is a 91 and I was a completely checked out student by the time I walked out the door in April, 1982. This is not OK. 

Not one more word about Betsy. We did this to ourselves years ago. 

//End rant//

I can't carry you anymore

He keeps talking about high performance athletes.

"Humans are the best long distance runners on the planet, able to outrun horses (and everything else) in marathon distance races"

1. I'd like to see the studies on that
2. But, why? Seriously, why? What the hell are we running from that we, at the top of the food chain (so I'm told), would possibly need to do that to our bodies and minds? 

I tracked this back to a brief 2007 article published by Phys.org (don't get excited), sourcing Harvard Anthropology Professor Daniel Lieberman. It has since become a sports meme. I was not impressed. It brought to mind Elizabeth's senior year statistics teacher telling the Mark Twain/Benjamin Disraeli joke (was that a joke? I was never sure) about the three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics. It brought to mind the little Arab/Quarter crosses my mother had shipped east from Seattle in the mid-eighties, barely green-broke, stubborn cusses and I'd cross the desert with either but most likely the gelding who might take a breath or two but I'm pretty sure he'd have paced himself for the long haul.

We have evolved well past being meant to run long distance for any good reason and I'm not sure anything was ever meant to run long distance for survival. 

There was this other thing that kept popping up, from a book, I think, but I didn't follow any of the links. 'The loneliness of the long distance runner'. I don't recall being lonely as a direct result of running miles and miles and miles when I could, but I do recall loneliness, grief, pain, and sometimes terror being the driving force behind the constant pounding of my feet, bare or otherwise, more often than not on the forest floor. At night. 

He keeps talking about high performance athletes.

I am not the high performance athlete; that would be my brother. I haven't the luxury. I recall a couple of things early on. Jack went on to live in his car right out of high school. He packed it up, drove south to Zephyr Hills and lived in that thing until my mother drove down the silver watermelon and he lived in that trailer until there was something a little bigger, probably when he got to Eloy, although I remember a very small apartment in Deland by a body of water and the cats may have been consumed by those great snouted beasts with rows and rows of teeth. OK, maybe just the normal amount of rows. But still, all those teeth. Jack went off to be the high performance athlete, I got married, had a baby, and then another and put my shoulder against the door of a world I did not have permission to enter. I had good reason.

In January, 1997 I sat in the ballroom of the Greenwich Hyatt and Florkow and Sparky were there and I listened to that disturbing man talk to five hundred consultants and trainers about the last six months and revenue and blah blah blah and then there were the awards and they got to the Service Person of the Year award and I sat there in the dark and though, Fuck. I want that thing. What the hell do I have to do to get that thing? Whatever it is, I'm going to do it. That's how Florkow and I became the High Performance Ponies while our lives were going to ruin around us because this shit had to be fixed one way or another. 

Why are we doing this? Because if we don't, nobody else will. 

We were bad mommies that year and the year after and took it on the nose but the bills got paid. It doesn't sound like that big a deal but when you find yourself condemned by your children your world pretty much goes to shit. And you just keep going. 

She never came right out and said, 'I live in terror of what he might do next', but it was there for a very long time. Back straight, head up, face frozen, we looked at each other with matching smirks and said, 'feelings? we don't have those, they're in a box in the garage' and felt strong. 

'You fake a college education better than anyone I know' 

'What the hell can you possibly be doing in a cube all day that pays you enough money to support your family?'

'Ohhhh, you're like your mother.'

Nope. Stop trying to be seen and just keep going. 

Jack became the best skydiver in the world and sent his medals home to our dad like the report cards that were never good enough (I'm not sure what 'good enough' would have been because we were free range until the scores showed up at the end of the term and since we weren't paying attention anyway, those scores could not possibly have been good). I sent the paperwork associated with my corporate awards to my mother but kept the engraved glass and later crystal, evidence. More recently I've left them sitting on the shelf with all Mike and Lucia's participation trophies. Yes, Mike, you are correct, they are not participation trophies but I don't need them anymore either. 

He keeps talking about high performance athletes.

I say that I am more afraid of talking to my brother about the things that happened to me, about the things that happened to us collectively because he was there and if he invalidated any of those things I am afraid I would fall through a hole and never make it back out.

He once said to me, I remember this, that I had all the memories. His was like a sieve and he remembered only pieces of our childhood while I remembered nearly everything. 'You hold the memories for both of us'.

Good for him, says Adam, not so good for you.

Adam asks me if there's anything in particular that I want to ask Jack and I tell him there is, actually. I tell him I want to know how we survived. I tell him I want to know how it was that there were so many weekends that we missed so many meals and I want to know how our parents lived mostly on beer. I want to know if he found a way to eat while I did not because I remember the time the man with the ice cream truck just up and handed him ice cream because of his sweet, five year old smile. I ask him if he remembers that sometimes there was a loaf of bread and a pound of Velveeta in the back of the car but often there was not. I want to ask him if he remembers that on very rare occasions we would have pizza ordered by our parents at the skydiver bar or a sandwich or something but more likely we would get a square of someone else's pizza or nothing at all. 

I also want to ask him if he was scared when we were put to bed in the car in the empty parking lot, wrapped in canvas jumpsuits, cold, shivering, hunkered down under the streetlights, praying for sleep but not and eventually going under, waking at the sound of the engine turning over. I want to ask him about the smell of the beer soaked carpeting under the tables and whether that was any better and I think it was because I wasn't scared.

I want to ask him if he remembers being left in the bar when one parent took one car and me and the other parent took the other car and neither was sober enough to be sure who had which kid until we all got to the parking lot in Hartford where one car was dropped for the morning commute. I want to ask and I am afraid. 

I want to ask other things too but I am more afraid of what I might remember. 

Last week I stared into the abyss with Adam holding the rope around my middle and I kept my eyes wide open. I saw the ocean of all things and it was moving and he pulled me back up. 

The fallacy of compartmentalization is deadly. All of those boxes kept separate and apart are an illusion, every bit of all things pushed down or put away or even set aside have been dropped into the same body of water. They swim, float, or claw their way to the surface, one giant mass.

I held my hand over my stomach and breathed into it last Saturday until it was safe to leave the room. For three days I walked on a precipice, gulping down air, trying to keep it open without falling off or in. I went back to work on Tuesday and lost sight of it in the turmoil.

I told him it was like looking into the Grand Canyon that first time. I felt infinitesimally small and lost. The only thing missing was the second part where I felt part of a greater whole. That is the redemption of standing at Mather's Point. There was no redemption in the abyss. 

It is full of grief! Shocked at the word because the week before I'd wept, 'that poor little girl' over the pain and fear. Grief and betrayal. How could you let this happen to me? Any of it. All of it. 

He keeps talking about high performance athletes.

And I'd started by telling him I could not, for the life of me figure out how to tell someone I was in trouble and make them listen or understand. I can't even decide when it's time to go to the hospital so clearly I can't even tell myself. I talked about how angry my first husband used to get when I was sick and that eventually I'd figured out that it was because it scared him. I talked about how disappointed my son was when he realized I wasn't the super strong, unbeatable woman he thought I was and how horrified I was at his disappointment. I talked about how susceptible I was to my middle child's subtle and not so subtle cruelties. I talked about the time Elizabeth, at eight or nine or ten, told me 'Daddy said to ask you for it because you have more money', and I hid myself in my room and cried. 

He asked me why I thought it was so important to listen to people.

I don't know what you mean.

You keep talking about listening to different communities and cultures so they feel heard.

Yes, it's important.

Do you feel like you're responsible for this?

Yes, I do.

Do you feel heard?

No, not at all.

Why not?

I don't know. I can't figure out how to be heard without freaking people out and I hate conflict so I just don't. 

You hate conflict.

Yes. I really don't like it. 

You need to be good.

Yes.

You don't want to get in trouble.

No. I really don't want to get in trouble.

Do you want to blend in and be invisible?

No. I don't want to be invisible, I just don't want to cause chaos but I do cause chaos. 

When do you cause chaos?

When something has to be done. Or, I guess when I just can't take it anymore or when I feel comfortable or when I'm not paying attention.

How often do you feel comfortable.

These days? Never. 

Are you always paying attention?

I'm trying.

High performance athletes.

What?

You carry the weight of all of it, don't you?

Yes, I do and I think that it's an illusion that I'm separate from this ocean. I think I'm actually sitting in it all the time and he shakes his head yes and I just sit there and cry until we're almost out of time and he tells me he needs to bring me back to someplace safe before the session is over.

I am thinking about making the sandwich in the car when we were two and four or three and five and it really doesn't matter and I am thinking about listening to all of the different beliefs and needs and fears and wants in all of the cultures and communities and part of it is because I am nomadic and unmoored and part of it is because I'm dragging the carcass that no one else feels inclined to pick up and I think the carcass should be picked up. 

I'm going to have to cut those lines and I'm sad about that because I really do believe there are viewing points to be had in addition to points of view. You know, have whatever you need to have but get your stuff off of me, ok? Basic tenets of human decency. Start with, don't come within a nuclear fallout's radius with your religion. I'm happy to hear it, honestly, I really am because it's fascinating, and you're fascinating (all gazillion of you with every single religious belief), but I swear to the universe, if you cast the net of your god over me one more time, I'm going to be homicidal. That is my very best example because there are so many beliefs and every single one of them, one way or another is trying to either convert or kill. How is this even possible? 

We are more attached to our pain and our righteousness then anything else. So be it. Maybe someone else will pick up the corpse.

There are two covers of The Sound of Silence making their way through the Facebook feeds today. I imagine one has resurfaced because the other was just released. It is absolutely amazing how a simple shift in the interpretation of a song that is so ingrained in the minds of the American population can radically alter our perspective. The friend who posted the most recent version referred to the original as one of the most important pieces of music in the twentieth century and I find that I agree with him. That he posted the gentler version is a harsh juxtaposition against his unwavering judgement of entire cultures associated with a political party.

I actually find that the version released in 2015 has significantly more impact but you have to be willing to go there. You have to replace Neon God with whatever it is you are currently worshipping, whatever it is you are currently defending to the death. It would be really easy for, I guess 85% of our population to take one look and dismiss it out of hand. That would be a shame, but par for the course.

Disturbed – The Sound of Silence – American heavy metal – Chicago, Illinois, formed in 1994, David Draiman, Dan Donegan, Mike Wengran, John Moyer, Erich Await, Steve Kmak  - youtube release 12/8/2015

Don't let these people slide through your fingers either. Who they are, where they're from, the order in which they sing, where they are standing, all of it matters. These people, they believe. 

Pentatonix – The Sound of Silence – American a cappella – Arlington, TX – Scott Hoying, Mitch Grassi, Kirstin Maldonado, Kevin Olusola, Matt Sallee - youtube release 2/15/2019

Relavent.

Simon & Garfunkel – The Sound of Silence – 1964