Rocky and Uncle Tugboat

copyright 2011

Big Yeller Dawg

Tales From the February Garden

In the kitchen window, my sprouts are emerging.

In their damp egg carton beds, bibb and romaine, kale and snow peas push out of the soil.  Spindly sweet pea flowers sit by a row of Ry’s sunflowers.  Cherry tomato, roma and purple heirloom from my own seed stock – one each, the rest of the little egg-bowls sit quiet, their seeds not viable.  I’ll have to buy plants, and get better at harvesting seeds.  Another two rows of peppers – sweet red and jalepeno – and some onion sets are taking their time.  Tonight I’ll plant another set of lettuces.

It’s my favorite time of year in Kentucky.  Our only real workable kitchen counter becomes my nursery (a folding table will have to suffice for chopping and mixing).  The Old Farmer’s Almanac is consulted, and consulted again, for predictions of the year’s final cold and frost.  The UK Cooperative Extension site is full of planting tables.  I never get my hands on a tiller in time.

Today, tiller-free and bare-armed, I dug up a lettuce patch and pulled away Fall’s greenhouse sheeting.  Dead tomato branches were hauled to rest in a back corner with December’s dried-out tree and evergreen boughs.  I unearthed a surprise, a hill of turnips, thawed and still crisp from their underground winter bed.  Even a few tiny carrots remained from last year’s too-late planting, the ones I never bothered to dig – most I’m sure went to the rabbits of the back acre.

I turned the compost, which is looking dark and delightfully rotten after the cold season, raked leaves out of the garden and discovered a line of daffodils, little green fingers, poking up from the humus at the base of the fence.  Wednesday, my calendar tells me, I’ll put my first seeds in the ground – spinach.

Of course, they say it might snow tonight.  I love northern Kentucky spring.

 

Monster in the Family

Mo, Rocky and I spent this past weekend at the Center for Courageous Kids in Scottsville, KY.  It was a retreat for heart kids and their families, recommended to us by Ry’s cardiologist.

Scottsville, Kentucky: home of the VERY FIRST DOLLAR GENERAL STORE.  It’s huge.  It’s a store.  It’s all for a dollar.  Or something.

I went into this weekend with an underlying anxiety about meeting all those kids with heart defects.  The heart monster that lives in the dark cave of my deepest insides that always gnaws on me might pop out and get me.  Seeing all those kids with their scary heart problems sounded … scary. As soon as I got there I put up the defenses.

What happened instead was that I met this lovely, charming little five-year-old boy with curly blond hair and a devilishly charming, Elvis Presley-with-baby teeth grin.  Defenses are useless against such cuteness.  For the sake of top-secret code names, we’ll call him L’il Dude.  His monster?  The kid had a heart transplant.  That’s, like, the scariest heart monster there is.  Transplant is the last resort, the thing they do when there’s nothing, just absolutely nothing else they can do to save your life.  When I found that out, I couldn’t help but just gaze at him in awe: L’il Dude had it so bad, he needed a heart transplant.  What was formerly someone else’s ticker is in that little chest, ticking away.

We became friends with L’il Dude’s parents.  They’re regular folks, easy to talk to, no airs, funny, nice people.  They don’t seem to have monsters lurking in their insides.  How could they?  Their monster lives with them, eats dinner with them, gives anti-rejection meds with them, goes to cardio visits and camps and kindergarten drop-off with them.  L’il Dude’s heart problems can not be hidden away like a secret you don’t want to tell yourself.

Even with Tetrology of Fallot, Ry’s heart problems were the mildest of any of the kids we learned about there.  The stories are heart stopping (no, I didn’t just say that).  Most have had multiple surgeries, like seriously multiple; one little girl has had 15 heart caths.  When Ry has her pulmonary valve replaced, she’ll have to have a heart cath – where they go in through an artery and put a little stint in her heart.  It’s pretty dangerous.  That little girl had 15.  And she’s still here on Earth, driving her mama crazy.

L’il Dude and his mom are coming to Louisville for some tests at Kosair Children’s next month.  They’re going to come stay with us during their visit.  I might just see about going with them to the hospital, as support.  I’m so glad we went this weekend.  My monster’s sitting next to me on the couch, reading over my shoulder.  He says to say hi.

Whitney Lee’s Monster Hearts, Women and Their Work, Austin, TX

On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 2011

Spending the day human-free, in the quiet company of my cat and dogs, researching startup costs and mulling over possible business names, drinking chamomile and eating salty French green beans from a can, thinking about racism. No one in this country escapes it – though we good-hearted, white liberal-types often tend to believe we’re immune. Racist? I’m not racist! Racist is that other guy, the one with the confederate flag bumper sticker. But there’s no escaping the insidious tendrils of bigotry that curl deeply inside our collective minds. It’s in our history, our movies, our advertising – it’s everywhere, and all these messages lodge themselves in us, piling on top of a guilt that most of us white people can not name. What we can do is accept that fact, get educated about it, bring it into our awareness, and decide what to do with it. There’s no need for shame, if we will do the work.

My dear friend Maggie Jochild, who’s given it decades of thought, says this: “The truest thing about America is that it is rooted in racism, and that every second of its history since white arrival, we have been fighting against racism with a profound, accurate belief we can eliminate it here.”

Bootie and the B!tch

Macho Neighborhood Dog: Whoa, Dude, what is UP with the pink bootie?
Jake: I was bleeding, so Glasseyes and the Kid put it on there til we could get to the vet.
Dog: HAHAHAHAHA! Lookit the FLOWERS! Are those … PANSIES?? HAHAHAHA!
Jake: No, they look more like little pink dai-   hey!
Dog: You have got to be kidding me! Widdle Jakey, in his widdle pink bootie! So what happened?
Jake: I broke a nail.
Dog: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHOOOOOOWWWWWWLSnortSnuffOh my gawd that’s classic
Jake: It was bleeding all over the floor, so they wrapped it up and put one of the Kid’s socks over it.
Dog: Awww, yer own little mani-pedi…
Sugarpaw: Hey Buster, back off my pack-mate.
Dog: My name’s Sam, Bitch.
Sugarpaw: I am Paw. And thank you for addressing me by my title.
Dog: I apologize, Alpha Bitch.  Your teeth are so sharp and pointy. Your fury and power overwhelm me. See? I lick your chin in supplication.  Lick lick lick!
Sugarpaw: I accept your supplication. Would you like to sniff my rear?
Dog: I would like to more than anything, but my Person is dragging me away … goodbye!
Sugarpaw: Let that be a lesson to him.
Jake: Thanks, Bitch!
Sugarpaw: WHADYOU CALL ME?? (SLAP)

Nude Marketing Strategies

Hallelujah, my back seems to be better. It’s a Christmas miracle, I’m pretty sure, that it only laid me up for a day and a half, and not during my work week. I know I need to obey the clinic doctor and start doing some yoga and swimming. I’m pretty sure I’m the only freak of nature in the entire universe who hates yoga and swimming. Maybe I can make it more interesting – naked yoga might be fun. I’m not sure how they’ll feel about it over at the Jewish Community Center where I have a membership.

Tomorrow I start the 10-week micro-enterprise training down at the Urban Government Building. I think that’s the building where they house all the resources for all the poor folks in the city. I’m not looking forward to the class, since I hate business classes as much as – no, more than I hate yoga and swimming. Naked micro-enterprise training? It’s a thought…

Bearing the Unbearable

A few weeks ago I live-trapped a young rat, slightly bigger than a field mouse, and since it was so bitter cold outside, decided to wait until warmer weather to release it (thinking it could use a few warmer days to build itself a nest).  I kept it in a 5-gallon bucket in the basement with a screen over the top, made sure it had bedding and food and a water bottle.  I felt badly about keeping it in there, trapped and all alone, but I thought my reasoning was sound.  Still, I had a bad feeling in my gut about keeping it down there.  Well, the water bottle stopped up.  An inch from water, my captive died of thirst.

I could have prevented it.

I have two sweet dogs.  Since they tend to chew shit up, we keep them crated when we’re not home.  Paw doesn’t mind, but Jake, with his hound dog spirit, hates it.  I have a similar nasty gut feeling about it.  If we left them outside, any number of terrible things could happen.  They could get out, get lost, get killed by a car, get stolen, get rocks thrown at them, get hurt like Sunny –

If only.  If only I had protected her better.

My daughter, my only child, was born with a serious heart defect.  The first four months of her life I lived in a catch-22 torture – she would have died without a surgery that could have killed her.  I want to cage her up in my heart, make her tiny and put her back in my womb so I can keep her close always, never let anything happen to her that could take her away, because I know how it feels to look into the great maw of that particular monster.

I couldn’t keep the rat alive, captive.  I couldn’t stop Sunny from going out on the porch, her favorite spot, that day.  We handed Ry over to the surgeon, and each day, I let her go.  I let her go with my hands, but my anxious heart stays wrapped around her, begging the world to bring her back to me safe.  She goes into the world, her beautiful, free, natural self, and I could lose her.  It’s true.  I can’t bear it.  I have to bear it.

How Cellular Technology Will Save My Member

Mo and I got new cellular telephones today.  We’ve “upgraded” – I think that’s what the young people these days call it.  In my day, when you upgraded, it meant you switched from a Clydesdale to a John Deere.  Or something.

So we got these super spiffy Pantech Laser Telephones.  If you’re one of those people that use Raspberry Telephones, or Eye Telephones, or whatever, you’re probably laughing at me.  But seriously, I’m such an old-fashioned hippie it’s really amazing I even use toilet paper.  You know, instead of recycled newspapers, or tree bark.

So the first thing I did on my new phone was to learn all about how to use it, which involves pushing a bunch of “buttons” on a “touch-screen” and smearing your finger across the front of it to make it move all around, which really is amusing until you start buying things like stocks and airline tickets by accident.  How do you clean these things, anyway?  I mean, I could spray it with Windex, which really does clean everything, but then when I went to wipe it off I’d end up buying a waffle iron or an overpriced sex toy or a few heads of cattle.  Though with all this fancy new technology, I could probably just point my phone at the cows and they’d move right along where they’re supposed to go, instead of all this whooping and hollering and bruising my member on the saddle nubbin.  And it would cook me a fine meal, something really modern like dim sum or goose le orange, instead of having to cook my hard tack and beans over those damn lazy woodstove coals. Or something.

Evacuations Should Happen More Often.

It seems like there’s going to be a massage evacuation every week.  Last time it was at the spa, for a gas line break.  Tonight it was at my home office – pounding on the door during a session, evacuated my client, two fire trucks, lots of handsome men in yellow rubbers … what was I saying?  Oh, right – everyone is okay, there was a fuse box fire upstairs, baby Henle was upset to be woken up, but Ry was away at Riley’s for the night, thank goodness.  Handsome firefighters.  What was I saying?