5
My granddad, Horace Adams, turns 89 today. I called this morning to wish him a Happy Birthday, and when he answered, he told me he was reading.
That he was reading was good news. Last summer, he had cataract surgery on his good eye. A scratched cornea during his recovery caused concern that he wouldn’t regain his vision.
I went to spend a few days with him, mostly so that I could drive him around and be his eyes until his vision was completely restored. The first morning, I woke to find him in the kitchen cooking me breakfast. And then I saw that the dryer was pulled away from the laundry room wall. “What are you doing with the dryer, Grandad?”
“Awww, the cotton-pickin’ thing ain’t workin’ this morning. I pulled it out to see if I can fix it.”
I didn’t dare mention calling a repairman. Because even with compromised vision, he’s still the best appliance repairman I’ve ever known. If he can’t fix it, no one can.
For as long as I can remember, at any given time, he’d have a broken dishwasher or clothes dryer, probably one he’d found abandoned on the side of the road, that just needed a few minor adjustments to make it as good as new. His grandchildren have never wanted for a major household appliance; we just had to ask Grandad if he had an old one lying around that he could fix. He mows his lawn with a Snapper he’s had since the 1960s. It’s older than I am.
My uncle says Grandad is hard-headed. And he’s probably right. Last December, I watched the two of them argue over whether or not Grandad should climb up on his own roof to install a satellite dish. The argument was getting a little heated, and I tried to diffuse it by saying, “Grandad, if you do, someone might think you’re Santa Claus.” He chuckled, but stubbornly refused to promise us that he wouldn’t climb up on his roof.
But stubbornness is his biggest fault. If you can even call it a fault.
Thankfully, on this chilly January morning in Atlanta, Georgia, his satellite and dryer were working, the grass didn’t need cutting, and he could see to read. After we chatted about his birthday party, our conversation turned to a man he knows who has been cheating on his wife and is now dragging out an acrimonious divorce by haggling over child support.
“He’s just sorry,” was Grandad’s take on the whole situation.
I got to thinking about it after we hung up, about how there are many things one could call a man who shirks his duty to a wife and children. The words I would use are a little saltier. But Grandad doesn’t cuss. “Sorry” is the harshest term he can conjure up. And to his way of thinking, “sorry” is also as low as you can get.
It reminds me of the conversation we had a lunch several months ago. My uncle brought up the Republican primaries, and he asked who I thought would win.
I hemmed and hawed and basically admitted I had no idea.
“I tell you what, though, Newt Gingrich is the smartest of the whole bunch,” my uncle finally said.
Grandad hadn’t said a word, but at that moment, he piped up and said, “Well, he ain’t smart enough to keep a wife!”
Ten years ago, he watched helplessly as my grandmother died of pancreatic cancer. He still wears his wedding band, and to this day, his eyes fill with tears at the mention of her name.
I’d rather die than every have him call me “sorry.” And I won’t remarry until I find one like him. Happy Birthday to one of the best men who will ever live.
This past week, my home looked like a scene from The Exorcist. My kid woke up New Year’s Day with a nasty stomach bug that acted suspiciously like what would happen if a 16-year-old boy had a celebratory shot or two with his older sister. But after about the fifth time he puked, I realized I’d been a little hasty in my judgment. And forcing him to take a few bites of hashbrowns to soak up the alcohol probably didn’t help matters.
By late afternoon, I was beginning to worry that we were going to end up in the emergency room. You see, when he was a kid, the doctor made sure I kept a supply of Phenergan, an anti-nausea medication that comes in the form of suppositories, in my refrigerator because of previous trips to the ER for dehydration following some nasty stomach bugs. When I mentioned Phenergan, my son, who was lying on his bed and almost unable to move, vigorously shook his head and said, “I can make it.”
It was three days before he was able to eat solid food, and he was as weak as Newt’s chances of being President. However, he was right. He made it. But he scared his mother half to death.
Three days later, Pancho, our three-legged Australian Shepherd, scared me worse. I woke up and went to let my dogs out to find that he had apparently caught a similar stomach bug. My garage looked like he’d consumed a gallon of Colonblow. The frightening thing, though, was that he couldn’t walk. He was so pitiful as he tried to pull himself toward me with his two front legs that I almost burst into tears. I picked up that 65-pound dog, put him into the backseat of my car, and sped to the veterinarian’s.
They checked him out completely and decided that he was simply weak from being sick. I carried him back to the car, took him home, and he slept on his beanbag chair in the house the whole day. Thankfully, by the next morning, he was back to normal.
There has been some debate in my family over the past few months about which of my dogs is the smartest. Certain family members like to joke that my dachshunds are dumb because their brains are only the size of a walnut. But after what happened this week, I’ve decided that they’re wrong. And I can prove it.
When my son was sick, several different people said to me, “You’d better watch out because that stuff is going around. You’re next.” My reply was that I wasn’t worried because I never get stomach bugs. The reason, I believe, is that I take massive doses of probiotics. I take a brand called Primal Defense, which is comprised of Homeostatic Soil Organisms (HSOs). In researching the product, I found this quote by a Dr. Goldberg: “It has been suggested that bacteria found in the soil referred to as Homeostatic Soil Organisms (HSOs), when ingested orally in a probiotic formulation, may have advantages over non-HSO probiotic formulas, due to their ability to implant and survive in the gut. The value of HSOs reportedly lies in promoting positive intestinal function, with corresponding systemic improvements in the patient’s overall nutritional, immunological and gastrointestinal status.”
Now, I’m not promoting Primal Defense. I’m just saying that I think the reason I never get sick is that I take probiotics, and this is the brand I use.
But why is that important? And what does it have to do with my dachshunds?
While all of this sickness was happening inside my house, several men were working outside my house to install the landscaping around my new pool. Off to one side, I had them prepare a small area for a vegetable garden. They mixed into the soil a large amount of cow manure. I walked outside one afternoon after the men had left for the day to find my dachshunds eating that dirt.
I realize this is highly speculative and based completely on circumstantial evidence. But my dachshunds eat from the same food bowl that Pancho does, and none of them became ill. I’m going out on a limb, I realize, but I think it might be because of the HSOs in that dirt. That or they don’t drink out of my son’s toilet like Pancho does.
Either way, in my book, it makes the dachshunds smarter. And if that’s not enough proof, I got confirmation from a second source.
I was out walking Shirley the other day, and we happened past a group of six neighborhood kids engaged in a game of touch football. There were five boys and one girl, who was wearing a dress and fancy tights. She was playing center — bending over and hiking that ball — in a dress. I was immediately impressed. When she saw Shirley, she squealed, “Dachshund!” and left the game to run over and pet my dog. She sat down on the curb and circled Shirley’s head with her fingers. She held up that circle of fingers to me and said, “Her head is this big.” Then, closing the circle a bit, to just about the size of a walnut, she continued, “Which means her brain is this big.”
“Yes, I think you’re right,” I said, laughing.
She looked me in the eye and said solemnly, “The smaller the brain, the smarter the dog.” And then she kissed Shirley on the lips.
I’ll bet that kid never gets sick.
In early 1992, my husband and I began construction on a new home. We’d put our home on the market, sold it within a week, and given every penny we had to a “preferred” builder in the new neighborhood we’d chosen as a deposit on the new place.
Right around the time the roof went on the house, we received word that our builder was filing for bankruptcy. Construction on our home was halted. Our choices were to walk away and lose our money or wait for three months, buy our home on the courthouse steps, then hire another builder to finish it.
We waited the three months and purchased the forlorn-looking home in progress. Thankfully, my husband was able to talk the bank into allowing him to assume the builder’s construction loan, but we soon found out that the builder had spent a good deal of our loan money on other projects, leaving us with just enough money to complete the home if we were frugal. But there was not enough money to hire a contractor. All of a sudden, my husband, a man who had to repeat to himself “lefty loosey righty tightey” just to change a lightbulb, became our builder.
Down the street, a guy named Ruben was building a million-dollar home for a former pro golfer. Ruben was a former acquaintance of my parents and was familiar with their ministry. He took pity on us and began sending his sub contractors over to work on our house at his negotiated prices. And every few days, his brother and business partner, Joel, would stop by to check on our progress.
One day, Joel and my husband were walking through the house, and Joel said, “You know, if you would take the time to screw these floors down, you’ll never have a creaky floor.”
My husband drove straight to Home Depot and bought himself a power drill and a huge box of screws. He went back to the house and began screwing down the floors.
Joel showed up a couple of hours later to check on him. He walked into the house, took one look at my husband and at the floor, and burst out laughing. He motioned for Darren to follow him downstairs to the basement, and then pointed up. Hundreds of screws were sticking through the particle boards that made up the floors. Joel had failed to explain that the boards needed to be screwed into the floor joists. My husband had screwed those floors into thin air.
I realize this is an opportunity to joke about my husband’s wayward screwing, to call it an early omen of his future cheating, and to wonder how I failed to notice that ominous warning.
But that’s not what I take from this story. I see it as more of a lesson on how we fixate on securing our futures only to find out that it’s an exercise in futility. We think our security resides in relationships or investment accounts or even houses, finding out when it’s too late that we’ve just been screwing our floors to nothing.
The whole search for certainty, in fact, is like those errant screws. We can only imagine security in terms of what we already know or have, and that means living in the past. The answer, then, is to not be a prisoner of the past but to be willing to live in the present.
So although I don’t do New Year’s resolutions, I want to live this next year in the moment, worried neither about what’s already happened or what might happen.
It reminds me of a story my friend Donna told me. Her granddaughter, who was visiting from California, insisted on an early morning swim in Donna’s pool. Little Katie, who’s seven, jumped into the chilly water, but Donna sat on the edge, hoping she wouldn’t have to get in. But Katie was having none of it. After much cajoling, Donna stuck a toe in, then eased down to sit on the top stair.
Katie persisted in trying to get Donna into the water. Finally, in frustration, she said to her grandmother, “LaLa, I came here to have fun!”
I’m fairly certain I’m not here to spend my life being worried. And I’m completely sure I’m not here to be miserable. It feels right, this idea that I’m here to enjoy my life and to be happy. I came here to have fun, and in 2012, I’m jumping in.
Apparently, stop doesn’t really mean stop.
I took my car in for service today. It’s a great little convertible, perfect for a girl who lives on the beach. But I’ve been thinking about getting rid of it. First of all, I already have a 5-year-old SUV with 100,000 miles on it that has never given me a moment’s trouble. I don’t exactly need the convertible, even though it is terribly fun to drive, especially on these beautiful fall Florida days when the temperature likes to stay in the 70s.
The real reason I’ve been thinking about selling it is that I keep getting a message saying, “High battery drain.” Six months ago, I called the service department at the nearest dealership, and the nice guy who answered my call told me the problem is that I have a racehorse of a car that I’m basically treating like a yak. I’m driving all of three miles every day, and the car just wasn’t built for short, slow trips.
My car deserves better, and although it was going to hurt, I was prepared to do the right thing.
Today I took it for an oil change. I intended to talk to the used car sales manager about taking it off my hands, but something interesting happened when I was dropping it off at the service department. The service rep took my key and plugged it into his computer so the car could tell them what it needed. The guy looked at me and said, “Your car isn’t turned off.”
Huh?
My car has a cool feature called “comfort access.” That means I can open my driver’s door and start the engine by pushing the start button, and I don’t even need the key. As long as the key is on my person or even in my purse, the car will unlock, and all I have to do is push the button to start it.
He continued, “With the comfort access feature, you need to hit the button twice to turn the car completely off. Just hitting it once turns the engine off, but it leaves the car actually on for 46 minutes.”
So I learned something new today. Something kind of important.
The good news is that the high battery drain is not caused by my grandma-like driving habits. I can keep my car! The bad news is that I’ve been causing the high battery drain because I’m too damn lazy to read the owner’s manual.
Then again, I’ve always been the kind of person who believes stop means stop. The first time.
It’s exactly 373 miles from my home in St. Augustine, Florida, to the one I recently sold in McDonough, Georgia, a town that has been swallowed up in the urban sprawl of Atlanta.
I purchased the Florida house in April 2007, two months after my divorce was final. It was supposed to be my second home, the place where I would occasionally go to write and, since it is in the same neighborhood where my parents live, the place where my entire family could gather in the summer.
Within a year, my occasional trips turned into frequent ones. And the more time I spent in St. Augustine, the more I realized I belonged at the beach. I could see a better life for myself in this beautiful Old City.
But my children, teenagers when I finally decided to move in 2009, didn’t want to leave Atlanta. They chose, instead, to live with their father.
In other words, my body moved to Florida, but I left my heart in Atlanta with those kids.
As luck would have it, my ex-husband refused to take any of the pets that went with the children. So I retained custody of our three dachshunds – Laverne, Shirley, and Squiggy – and their self-appointed shepherd, a three-legged Aussie named Pancho.
Every couple of weeks, I loaded the four dogs into the back of my 2007 BMW X5, gave the dachshunds a dose of Benadryl to calm their nerves, and made the trip to Atlanta. I-95 north to I-295, the Jacksonville bypass, to I-10 west to I-75 north to exit 222, Jodeco Road.
I would say that I know which service stations have the cleanest restrooms and which stops have the best places to walk a dog, but that would be a lie because I don’t stop. I like to play a little game with myself called “beat my best time.” And making it between St. Augustine and McDonough in record time precludes any bathroom breaks and stops for gas. My dad is convinced I wear Depends when I drive. And my dogs have learned to hold their bladders for the duration of the trip.
I do, however, know the speed traps along that route. Be careful in Adel, Georgia, and don’t ever speed in Tifton.
According to MapQuest, the trip should take me 5 hours and 57 minutes. And it does, give or take 65 minutes.
I once made the trip in 4 hours and 45 minutes after my neighbor in McDonough called to tell me water was streaming from the basement of my house. I threw the dogs in the car, jumped in with my hair still wet from the shower, and drove like Danica Patrick on speed to find that a burst water heater had done $55,000 worth of damage to my basement.
The same trip once took me over seven hours, thanks to Thanksgiving traffic and a carsick child. And then there was the trip that seemed to take 16 hours, mostly because I shared it with a pissed-off teenage girl and her crazy Bengal cat.
People used to cringe when they heard how often I made the drive, usually asking, “Don’t you hate it?” And the honest answer was, no, I loved it. I loved the solitude, the time to think. And I loved to see my kids.
But the frequent trips to Atlanta have stalled for two reasons: my girls are now in college, and my son decided to move back in with me.
When he made the decision, I flew to Atlanta from Jacksonville so that we could ride back together in the crimson Jeep Wrangler he got when he turned sixteen this past July. He put his things – a huge suitcase, his computer, his Yonex tennis bag with all of his racquets, and a giant trash bag full of dirty clothes – in the back of his new car and then surprised me by handing me the key and saying, “You drive.”
I pulled onto I-75 headed south, and within fifteen minutes, my son was sound asleep. I was once again driving that familiar stretch alone with my thoughts, and all I could think about was how quickly our lives change.
It seems like yesterday I was waking him up from a nap and buckling him into his carseat in the back of my crimson Ford Explorer to go pick his sisters up from school.
And was it really thirteen years ago I stepped out of the shower, missed him, and found him in the garage spray painting the driver’s side of that same car?
I thought about all the miles I’d put on my X5 driving him to and from tennis tournaments in the years before he’d moved in with his dad. To Knoxville, Tennessee. To Jackson, Mississippi. To Greenville and Columbia, South Carolina. And all over the state of Georgia. Because we left after school on Fridays to make it for an early Saturday match, he slept on the way to those tournaments. After those tournaments ended on Sunday evenings, he was exhausted from the matches and slept most of the way home.
One particular trip, his coach rode with us. We left Atlanta late on a Friday evening for a tournament in Louisville, Kentucky, and I was grateful to have someone else doing the driving. But around one o’clock in the morning, when we were still a couple of hours from Louisville, the car suddenly swerved, and I looked up to see the coach nodding off. I angrily demanded that he pull the car over and let me drive. Because when it comes to looking after that kid, I don’t sleep.
I thought about how, two years from now, when he packs up that Jeep and heads off to college, it will seem like yesterday that I brought him to Florida to live with me.
He woke up as we approached the outskirts of Jacksonville and asked me to stop so he could go to the bathroom. I didn’t say a word about my not stopping policy and my record driving time game. And it wasn’t because I’d already ruined my time by stopping to fill up the Jeep in Valdosta, or because the Jeep is slower than my BMW.
It’s because I’m on the last few miles of this trip with my son, and I’m in no hurry for it to end.
My sister is an intelligent woman. She’s a college professor who will soon have a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology. In addition, she runs a home that used to include a husband, four young children, three dogs, four turtles, several frogs, a hermit crab, a cat, and a rabbit named BunBun. But the cat despised both the kids and the dogs and wisely moved to the next-door neighbor’s house.
She’s so very smart, and she has a heart. Which is why I can’t say that I was surprised when she called a few weeks ago to tell me about the new additions to her household. A friend’s Rottweiler got into a rabbit’s nest and killed the mama. So the woman brought the babies to my sister in hopes of saving them.
Why, I wondered aloud, was my sister the local rabbit rescue? When she told me it was because she had an adult rabbit, I said, “BunBun is going to adopt them?”
My sister, the almost-Ph.D., patiently explained to me that baby bunnies need to be around adult rabbits because they need a source for probiotics in order to be able to digest their food. The source is adult rabbit droppings.
In other words, the phrase “eat shit and die” doesn’t apply to bunnies. It’s more like “eat shit or die.”
So for about a week, the household included a husband and four young children, three dogs, four turtles, several frogs, a hermit crab, a rabbit named BunBun, several newborn rabbits, and an awful lot of probiotics. Throw in a lizard or another kid, I warned her, and she might find herself featured on an episode of Hoarders.
In fact, there was once an episode about rabbits. Kathy and Gary started out with only two bunnies, Dottie and Studley, who multiplied like, ummm, rabbits. The place looked like a nuclear explosion had occurred and only rabbits had survived. Within a few months, the rabbits had chewed through walls and eaten the wiring in the house. During the show, this ominous caption appeared: “The bunnies eventually took over the house.”
Seeing all the droppings in that bunny-hoarding house made me think of George Carlin’s 1997 book Brain Droppings, especially this line: “I have as much authority as the Pope, I just don’t have as many people who believe it.” And that brings us right back to my sister’s specialty; cognitive psychology is pretty much about which voice in your head you’re listening to — the Pope’s or Kathy the Bunny Hoarder’s. In addition, sometimes I wonder who or what is the authority at my sister’s house. Is it the Ph.D. who is an expert on human behavior or a lizard brain?
As it turns out, BunBun’s nurturing skills are closer to those of a Playboy Bunny than those of Mrs. Peter Rabbit. Depending upon how you look at it, it’s either a good thing or a bad thing that all of the baby bunnies except for one died. The household is, thankfully, down to two rabbits. But that could be a problem if they’re anything like Dottie and Studley.
The moral of the story, of course, is to take your probiotics, in whichever form life delivers them. Otherwise, you might just find yourself hare today and gone tomorrow.
When I was a child, my parents read to my brother, sister, and me every evening from a giant book called Character Sketches that used animals to illustrate Christian values. I came across that old tome recently and was a little surprised to find that a book about eternal values illustrated with something as universal as animals needed some serious updating.
Take, for instance, the entry for diligence. According to the dictionary, diligence is, simply, “careful and persistent work or effort.” The Character Sketches entry on the subject is a tad more ambitious: “Seeing each task as a special assignment from God and using all my energy to accomplish it.”
The bigger problem with Character Sketches, however, is that the animal example of diligence is the beaver. Beavers are perfect examples of diligence, the book says, for four reasons:
1. A beaver is always busy
2. A beaver maintains good grooming
3. A beaver does its work with precision
4. A beaver prepares for times of scarcity
The problem with using the beaver to illustrate the virtue of diligence is obvious. All four beaver qualities are applicable to both the animal version of the beaver and, well, the Urban Dictionary kind of beaver. Added to that is the problem that nowadays, most people don’t see the animal version of the beaver on the regular basis. I believe Character Sketches should name a new spokesanimal for diligence. I would like to nominate the dachshund.
I’m the mother of two dachshunds, Laverne and Shirley, who took a “guard the yard” oath as puppies and are sworn to keep squirrels, raccoons, and UPS guys away.
My dachshunds unfailingly see each task as an assignment from Almighty God and use all their energy to accomplish it. In fact, their zeal got me in trouble with the local authorities. Twice.
A few years ago, I got a ”Sorry We Missed You” note from the mailman. He wanted me to drive fifteen miles to pick up the Harry & David pears my in-laws had sent. I called the post office to ask why he couldn’t leave them on my doorstep.
The woman who answered at our local post office put me on hold. After a few moments, she came back on the line, and with the full authority of the United States Postal Service backing her, said sternly, “Ma’am, your dog was hanging from his shorts.”
“Excuse me?”
“The carrier started to walk the package to your doorstep. Your dog tried to bite him and ended up hanging off the hem of his shorts.”
That gave me pause. I meekly said, “From now on, I’ll pick up my packages.”
Not long after that, a tax assessor who arrived at my residence unannounced went away with an ankle bite that drew blood. Laverne and Shirley were put under house arrest, and they were added to the county’s vicious animals list, the equivalent of having your picture hanging in the post office.
My dachshunds demonstrate diligence in the same four ways the beaver does. For starters, they’re always busy. In fact, as I write, they’re hopping on their three-inch legs through tall St. Augustine grass and barking furiously at Otis, the sheepdog who lives down the street, warning him to stay on his side of the fence.
As for grooming, my dachshunds are of the opinion that they should suppress their natural scent in order to best hunt their prey. Which is why I found Laverne rolling around on a dead mouse in our yard just the other day.
Yes, they do their job with precision. They’re adept at locating the Achilles tendon, the best place for a little dog to bite and still draw blood.
Finally, dachshunds provide for times of scarcity by gorging themselves during times of plenty. I’ve even wondered if they suffer from Prater-Willi Syndrome, the disease that causes its victims to never feel full and potentially eat themselves to death.
Because of their dogged determination, dachshunds should be the new Character Sketches face of diligence. Laverne and Shirley are available if the book’s authors would like to use them as models for their next edition. And while my pups are off pursuing this new career, I’m going to need a new pet to guard my yard, one that displays equally great courage in facing snakes, delivery people, and tax assessors.
Character Sketches is currently recommending the striped skunk.
The instructors in the Spalding University MFA in Writing Program don’t usually give us students actual assignments. We have the freedom to go where our creativity takes us. But this semester, I did get a specific assignment: find a newspaper from the day you were born, and write about what was happening when you came into the world.
I was born February 9, 1967. It was the Year of the Goat, but I didn’t learn that from a paper placemat in a Chinese restaurant. A search of the New York Times revealed that in the early hours of February 9, 1967, firecrackers set off to celebrate the beginning of Tet, the three-day Chinese New Year celebration, spooked American soldiers in Saigon, who thought they were hearing gunfire.
So I guess you could say I came in with a bang. And what makes me feel a little bit special is that I wasn’t born on just any old day in the Year of the Goat. I got here on New Year’s Day. I got the Goat party started. Doesn’t that make me kind of a head goat?
In addition, February 9, 1967, wasn’t merely the beginning of the Year of the Goat. It was the first day of the Year of the Fire Goat.
According to the Chinese Zodiac, goats are creative, intelligent, dependable, and calm. Fire goats, however, are exceptionally creative and intelligent. Calm? Not so much. We fiery goats don’t need the approval of others, but we get along well with Rabbits and Pigs. However, the Rat and the Ox need to give us a wide berth.
It explains a lot, actually. Now I know why I’ll pretty much eat anything and not care what anyone thinks about it. I have a digestive system made of titanium. And like goats, I’m prone to pinkeye and foot-and-mouth disease and the related foot-in-mouth disease. In fact, my foot is pretty much always in my mouth.
And this: if you mess with my kid, I’ll head-butt you.
The New York Times also reported on that cold Thursday morning in February 1967 that President Lyndon B. Johnson was appealing to Congress to raise the debt ceiling because the war in Vietnam was so costly. The debate lasted well into 1968, and the issue in question was whether the new debt would be paid for by spending cuts or tax hikes.
Closer to home, the Jackson Progress-Argus, the local paper for the tiny town of Jackson, Georgia, reported that an educational program in the local prison was under-funded. If the necessary $54,000 could not be raised, the 60 men in the program would finish their sentences and be released without having had the benefit of the counseling and work training that the program offered.
The front page of that little paper also ran a column about the beginning of a new Alcoholics Anonymous chapter in Butts County, Georgia, with information on how to find out when and where meetings were held.
Forty-four years later, similar headlines can be found in nearly every paper in America. We’re at war. Congress is fighting with the President over the debt ceiling. Prisons are over-crowded and under-funded, and every day, a different celebrity checks into rehab.
The problem, I think, is that we have this idea that life is like high school. Teachers hand out tests. Some students pass, and some fail, but regardless of the outcome, everyone moves on to the next test.
I believe life gives us the same test over and over – in various forms, yes, and perhaps with a different cast of characters – until we learn the lesson and finally pass the test. And what I’ve come to realize about passing life’s tests is that it only happens when we take responsibility for our selves. Blaming anyone else for how we feel or act is an automatic F. Interestingly, another name for the blame game is scapegoatism.
History repeats itself until we collectively pass the test. Once that happens, we’ll be able to move onto some new material.
Yes, it seems like some things never change. But I know change is possible because on February 9, 1967, I was a new baby. And now I’m an old goat.
I have trouble buying toilet paper. The big rolls, giant rolls, and mega rolls confuse me. Why can’t there just be one size of roll — mega is fine — so that we all know what we’re buying?
I just paid $12 for a Charmin Ultra Soft MegaRoll pack declaring that 9 MEGARolls! = 36 REGULAR Rolls!* I picked up the package to see what the asterisk (*) referred to, but even after scouring the entire package, I could not find the corresponding asterisk
There’s another little symbol on the package, a sort of + with rounded edges, next to the words “Roll Fit Guarantee,” outlining Charmin’s promise to refund in full the price of the MegaRoll pack if the MegaRolls don’t fit on your toilet paper holder. Just send Charmin the reason for your complaint with a copy of the register receipt, and you’ll receive a refund for the entire amount — $12 in my case – within 60 days.
I have no idea how the Charmin rolls compare in size to the other brands, and the sign in Publix declared the Charmin to be the “Best Value.” So what did I have to lose by purchasing the Charmin Ultra Soft MegaRoll pack?
A sane person would say, “Nothing. The Charmin Ultra Soft MegaRoll pack is on sale, and if I don’t like it, I can just tell Charmin it was too big, and they’ll refund my money. I could potentially get 36 free rolls of toilet paper.” Actually, a sane person would just grab the brand that’s on sale and move on to the trash bags.
But that wasn’t my thought process. Holding that large package of Charmin Ultra Soft toilet paper in my hand and searching for the missing asterisk took me back to an event that happened nearly four years ago, something I obviously hadn’t gotten over.
My divorce was freshly final, and my ex-husband decided to take our children to his parents’ condo in Destin, Florida, for a few days. They were scheduled to leave at 1:00 in the afternoon, but like every other time my ex was supposed to leave for a vacation, 3:00 rolled around with no sign of him. I was sitting on my back porch reading. Around 3:30, I walked inside to get a drink and was surprised to see my ex-mother-in-law standing in my kitchen.
She had come to my house, she said, to have a meeting with my three children and my ex for the purpose of handing out and discussing a list of rules for staying in her condo.
Her son, as usual, was missing in action, but I called my three teenagers into the kitchen, and their grandmother proceeded to read them the rules. I went back outside.
My ex arrived sometime around 4:00. After they loaded up and left, I walked back inside to find a stray copy of the condo rules. It was four typewritten, single-spaced pages.
And somewhere around page 3, it said, “You are welcome to use the toilet paper already in the condo, but please be sure to replace what you’ve used with only Charmin Ultra Soft tissue (my emphasis). We’re sorry, but that’s the kind we prefer.”
For nearly four years, I have purposely avoided purchasing Charmin Ultra Soft toilet paper just on the principle of the matter. Yes, they have the right to ask people who are using their condo for free to replace used tissue with the same brand. Of course they do. But seriously? It’s toilet paper!
So this morning, as I stood in the toilet paper aisle holding that big package of tissue and scouring it for the asterisked explanation of 36 REGULAR Rolls!, it dawned on me that I was standing in the middle of the grocery store aisle contemplating toilet paper. And that it was taking me much longer to pick out something to wipe my behind with than it took to choose a steak. Or a bottle of wine.
Can you say “asinine?”
I bought the Charmin UltraSoft MEGARoll pack. I brought it home and used some of it, and by God, my former in-laws are right. It’s very soft. It’s the perfect paper for a chapped ass.
Oh, and I finally found the little explanatory asterisk. 9 MEGARolls! equals 36 REGULARRolls! – and I quote – “based on the number of sheets.”
And for those anticipating a joke that it should be based on the number of sh*ts, shame on you. The giant rolls use that standard.
My fascination with dachshunds began when I was a toddler. As my mother tells it, I watched Disney’s The Ugly Dachshund. Although it’s about a great dane who thinks he’s a dachshund, my two-year-old self thought the dachshunds stole the show. “I want one of those dogs!” I insisted, and nothing else would do.
They got me a tiny red female shorthair named Jessie, who my mother trained to say her prayers with me every night. “Let’s say our prayers, Jessie,” prompted the little dog to fold her front paws one over the other and stick her little nose between them, as if to bow her head.
Honestly, I don’t remember Jessie saying her prayers or sleeping with me or even watching movies with me. What I do remember is seeing her wander into the street and get hit by a motorcycle. I remember watching her struggle for breath. And I remember seeing my dad walking back to the house carrying a shovel and a bath towel, his head down and shoulders slumped. Somewhere in all of that, I decided that in my life, whenever possible, I would always have and would always take care of dachshunds.
I got to thinking today about how much money that decision has cost me.
There are the big expenses, of course, like the time Laverne went head to head with a copperhead and ended up in the puppy emergency room after hours. She was fine after the vet administered a $500 shot of Benadryl. The silver lining in that cloud was that we learned dachshunds have some sort of superhero copperhead anti-venom in their blood. A copperhead bite, in other words, will only cause them to swell up and foam at the mouth. It won’t kill them.
I’ve paid thousands to install Invisible Fences at my last three homes. Then there was the expensive speeding ticket I couldn’t talk my way out of because the dachshunds were barking ferociously and lunging at the cop. And I don’t even want to talk about how much it cost me to board them for the ten days they were under Henry County, Georgia, “house arrest” for biting a tax assessor.
The costs were mounting as I added up the everyday expenses, like vet bills, dog food, and Shirley’s thyroid medication. And I had to pay $75 to get Laverne’s ear stapled back together her last fight with Shirley.
I don’t begrudge my dachshunds most of the money I’ve spent on their well-being. I signed up for it, and they repay me with affection and appreciation. And regular looks that say, “Bite me.”
There is one canine expense that makes me rabid — the doggie dentist bill. It costs more to have my dogs’ teeth cleaned than it does to have mine cleaned, even without dental insurance. In addition, I once paid several hundred dollars to have a stick removed from Shirley’s mouth after it got stuck and the tissue in her mouth began to grow around it.
During Shirley’s last checkup, the veterinarian looked in her mouth and gave me the same speech the dentist did when my daughter was three, something along the lines of, “Your child has a cavity because you don’t brush her teeth for her.”
I’d rather read Snooki’s book than try to brush a dachshund’s teeth, so I scheduled a dental cleaning for her the next morning. When I picked her up that afternoon, the receptionist handed me a little bag with four tiny teeth in it, the bad ones that had to be extracted. “Some people want to keep their dog’s teeth when they lose them,” she explained.
“Why? Is there a tooth fairy for dogs?” I joked.
“That’s $300 for the cleaning,” the receptionist said.
I handed her my American Express card and said, “I think I just answered my own question.”
http://looksgreatnaked.com/2011/03/finding-a-voice
