When the Rage Doesn't Fall Far from the Tree

Somewhere when I was about twenty-seven, I stopped speaking to my mother.  I had moved away from Rhode Island to Maryland a year or so earlier, and had a visit from my two sisters, but now I wanted my youngest sister to visit and my mother said no.

We did that in my family.  My father was the model for not-speaking.  He tended to only speak to one of my mother's many brothers and sisters at a time, for what I understood to be some very strange reasons.  From about the time I turned, oh, thirteen, we would "have a fight," meaning that my father would yell at me for something, and we would not speak to each other for several months, sometimes up to six, which would correlate to the time between my birthday and Christmas.  We tended to start speaking again around events.  Again, this is my recollection, which is faulty.  Ask my daughter.

Because she has carried on the tradition, and in a most noble way.  And I have fought it, and fought it, and fought it.  Since she was about thirteen, I think, shortly after we moved from Long Island to Charleston, leaving her father and her friends behind, she began to fly into rages at me.  Much like I would do to my mother when I was her age.  Unlike my father, my mother would not fight back; I wasn't scared of her.  So I would let my temper fly.  I had reason to be angry, my father was rigid and cruel, my mother refused to stand up to him.  This left me isolated from friends, and depressed.

My daughter's rage came from, well, apparently I still don't have a handle on it, because she rages on.  We've had what I thought were years when we were getting closer, dotted with periods when she would get distant.  I would try to ignore what was obviously going on, get angry when she would not come home, be hurt when she was able to effortlessly go months without talking to me, try to talk to her about what was going on.  And all the while ignoring her crazy, insane rage that was on fire against me.

Recently the coldness has become so obvious, she has been ignoring me to the point that I could no longer pretend nothing was going on, and I decided I was so miserable I had to confront it.  What I ended up confronting, to my amazement, was that same rage from her teenage years.  That rage I felt toward my mother when I was my daughter's age.  And it's left me stunned.

Back when I began writing "Ruminations..." I was letting it all hang out.  Not so much ranting against my kids, but ranting against being abandoned by my kids.  Then a few people began to read it, and I decided it wasn't right to be so personal, not fair to the readers, nor to my family.  I am writing this now (to be published at a later time and after a period of consideration) because this is the reality of my life, maybe the most important thing that is happening to me.

The loss of a child is an unspeakable loss.  And yet that is what I am wrestling with right now.  Her rage is unapproachable, unstoppable.  Other than no longer being me, I wouldn't have any idea how to change it.  And I have over the years even tried to not be me, to not speak my mind, to pretend everything was fine.  It was a fear of those teenage years (mine and hers), of the awful, untrue things that were said in those rages.

But to ignore her anger at this point is to ignore my own existence, and I couldn't do that.  She couldn't ignore it either, it was seeping into our "normal" conversations.  Neither of us are capable of resolving it, not from this distance, any better than we could when we lived together.

I don't remember how long I went without speaking to my mother.  It seemed like years, but couldn't have been.  Because when she was sixty and I was not that much more than twenty-seven, I got a call from my youngest sister saying that my mother was in the hospital, having a triple bypass.  Of course we reconciled, and I was able to be closer to her for three years, until she died.  When she was sixty-three, which happens to be the age I just turned.

You can't make someone aware of how near we all are to losing each other forever.  For me I was able to come to that awareness before it was too late.  Which makes what we are going through now, me and my daughter, all that more poignant.

The loss of a child is an unspeakable loss.  This is a loss I just can't accept, and so I will speak about it, and hope it isn't so.

Resorting to Vacation

I have a bad attitude about being home these days.  Being home means taking care of stuff.  It means mowing the damned lawn, which in a season with plenty of rain and just enough sweltering heat and sun like we have this year you can pretty much watch it grow.  And then mow it again.  And to boot, I ran my mower over a bit of concrete early in the season and have had to deal with whatever it is that has made my blade come loose.  It's been fine for awhile, but still, it's my job to anticipate it coming loose again and to worry about it until it does, or until November, whichever comes first.

And then there are the damned trees.  I am no fan of trees, unless they are ornamental and I have chosen to share my yard with them.  So sue me.  But the ornamentals get diseases and either die or continue to live but taunt me with their fungal growth.  I grew mimosas from seeds that I had taken from the bridge at Wadmalaw Island when I first moved here, because I think flowering mimosas are the most glorious sight ever, even better than the drink.  I was tickled that they grew so abundantly here in the south, and watched the tree that I had apparently planted in the perfect spot as it grew and flowered and grew and flowered for years, until one year it died.  It made me watch it die, as one branch wilted, and I cut it off, and then another wilted and I cut that one off, until finally I realized it was always going to be one step ahead of me, and I just let it go, which I imagine it did with a sigh of relief.  It was heartbreaking.

But the oaks are just another whole damn matter.  I don't care what kind of oak it is, I'm disgusted with all of them, even the one they worship down here, the "live" oak (as opposed to what, the "dead" oak?).  They do die, every year, and at the time of year that things are supposed to be coming alive.  And when they do this dastardly transition from life to death to life again, they spit all kinds of crap onto the earth, which includes my car and my pool.

And don't get me started on the "water oak."  I would say they are the worst of the weeds, but there is so much competition down here.  I have a few ornamentals by the road that are trying hard to survive, but water oaks come up right in the same spot, and I have to cut them back twice a year, which of course I don't, because I refuse to be "Yardwork 'R' Us" in whatever years I have left.

The alternative being to sit on my porch with a good book and get aggravated because I should be:  weeding, cutting, mowing.  And cleaning the algae off the sides of my house, vacuuming my pool, sealing the deck, painting the porch... and I haven't even gotten to housecleaning yet.

I just noticed yesterday that my car, with 174,000 miles on it, appears to be peeling, like the dead skin off a sunburn.  I'd been hoping to settle for just maintaining the working parts of it; as with my philosophy about myself, I'm more concerned with function than cosmetics.

Outside my window, right now, there is a thunderstorm.  But I'm not at home, so I don't have to worry about losing power.  The resort has wifi and cell reception, so for a week anyway I don't have to deal with AT&T.  The biggest crisis I have had this week is that last night I didn't feel like going out to get dinner and I hadn't bought anything to cook, so I popped a bag of popcorn -- provided by the resort -- and ate some shrimp I had bought and boiled on Monday.  I was proud of the way I handled the crisis, but believe me, that's not happening again soon.  I made a run for cheese, olives and crackers this afternoon (no, still not going to cook).

This was an unexpected vacation, as I was unable to rent out my August timeshare this year.  So this vacation week was sandwiched between my annual Rhode Island family birthday reunion / beach fest (one person can make a fest) and an impulsive redweek.com purchase of a very reasonably priced week at Fort Myers Beach at the end of August.

It felt excessive.  Not only do I tend to feel guilty about going away too much, I have a very dear friend who responds to my informing her that I am going on vacation by asking, "Vacation from what?"

But it's worked out so well that I might even do it again next summer.  And I'm thinking about actually taking two weeks to meander up the coast to Rhode Island in the winter, for Christmas, because I am feeling so adventurous.

I worry about what fires I will have to put out when I get home.  Fortunately, there have not as yet been fires, but there are occasionally things that have broken that need tending.  And the grass needs mowing.  Again.  But at least I haven't had to watch it.

My Wild Kingdom

This is the way we mow our lawns out here in the boonies:  we wait until the grass gets high, then goes to seed, and then we wait to see who blinks first.  After one lawn gets mowed, a day or two goes by and another victim gives in, until we all have somewhat newly mowed lawns.  Except for my neighbor who lives across the street and mows the lawn every week.  We mostly ignore him.

I mowed my front lawn four or five weeks ago.  For a couple of weeks I felt pretty good because it had been mowed.  Then for a week or so I just ignored it.  Then it got to bothering me, so I've been trying to work myself up to the two-hour task for a few days.  Yesterday I was relieved to see that it really, really looked like rain, so I decided not to mow.  I am going away for ten days in the middle of July, and if I put off mowing just a little longer, I won't have to do it again till I get back.  So I was at the point where I'd like to get it over with, but I could wait.  Then, around noon, the sun came out smiling.

I don't have a drink till five, and I don't do yard work after noon.  This makes for a fairly stress-free retirement.

So today I planned on mowing.  Even though the morning came up cloudy.  I figured it had to be a ruse, like yesterday.

Around ten, I went out to the shed and opened the door.

I've lived out here in the rural south for over fifteen years now.  I'm more scared of things breaking down and having to fix them than of running into critters.  I've run the lawn mower over a nest of ground-wasps and was covered in stings:

This is what it looked like, except
I have more hair.

Currently, there is a spider that persists in building an elaborate web that attaches to my blueberry bushes.  Every day or two when I go out to pick berries, I take a twig and tear off the web.  I usually leaves webs intact, respecting the amount of labor involved, but not if it interferes with something essential, like berry-picking.  Undaunted the little critter gets right back to work, and I end up destroying yet another web a couple of days' later.  It may be my imagination, but lately the effort has seemed just a bit less enthusiastic.  I hope when berry-picking is over my friend will not have given up and will make one last and more lasting attempt.

Given that, I don't just stick my hand in dark corners of my shed.

My favorite critter story is the afternoon that a pack of dogs chased a bobcat onto my porch, where it sat and watched me watch it for five hours, until Animal Control came.  After sending the bobcat off for parts unknown:

Fairly relieved Animal Control Officer:  "So, if you have any more trouble, if it, uh, comes back, just give us a call."

 Me:  "And you'll come out and toss another glass of water at it?"

To continue.  I opened the shed and there lying on top of the door was a snake.

I considered carefully closing the door and returning to the house.  Then I thought about the very long grass.  And then I decided that if I just walked away, I would never want to open that door again, just in case that snake was still lying there, waiting.

  

I walked carefully around the door to the side of the shed, carefully got hold of the hose, turned off the nozzle, turned on the faucet, and went round to the door, never taking my eyes off the snake, lest it take off and leave me not knowing where it might be hiding.  But it was still there, obviously quite comfortable.

I opened the nozzle and then pointed it at the snake.  For several seconds it barely moved, and then I realized that it had opened its mouth so that it could get the full stream.  I imagined it must be thirsty.  Or was just enjoying a long unexpected shower.  After a surprisingly long time, it began to move toward the shed, and I stopped it with the water.  Then it wound around itself, so that it looked like it might have been two snakes.  Then it went back to position #1.  This went on for quite a few minutes.  As long as it didn't seem interested in leaping the few feet it would take to reach me, I was okay with that.

Finally it decided to escape via the roof.

I'm not used to snakes that are not at ground level.  There are bunches of new cats in the neighborhood lately, and I'm thinking the snakes have had to find places that are a bit more challenging to the feline stalker.  We've all heard stories about snakes that hide in trees and fall onto people as they walk past.  So I would have been happier if my friend had slithered down the door of the shed and away into the shrubbery.  But I figured that this was probably the best it was going to get.  Unlikely that it would come back for me.  And the damned lawn was not going to mow itself.

So I cautiously got the mower out of the shed.  And now I have a nicely mowed lawn that I can enjoy for a couple of weeks, ignore for a couple more, and then eventually get around to mowing again.  I'm hoping the snake will have found a new home by then.

Raging Against the Dark -- and the Clumsy

There is an old Peanuts cartoon that I have carried with me since I was a kid:

It has stood me in good stead all these years. I especially enjoy pulling it out when I am being lectured on my negative attitude. Call it the “half-empty” philosophy, but it's still just a bit more accurate than those “half-full” optimists.

I've been reading book two in an inevitable mystery series by Daniel Friedman, a young man who has created an 88-year-old crotchety detective in a way that I know he knows this old guy. A Jewish detective in the 60's in Tennessee, during the battles of the civil rights era. And now he's in an assisted living facility driving everybody crazy, barely able to stand up but still wielding his .357 against the bad guys.

I can really relate to that. I want to go out bitching about getting old; I want to do it loud enough that all those young folk can't ignore it.  And this past week has really been about cursing the darkness, and this time it's not my usual rant about politics and stupidity.

A week ago, on Monday, on a beautiful day, I walked outside and picked up a partially filled water bucket so my tomatoes wouldn't go from hardy to dead in this damned drought. Before it was even off the ground, I felt a pain shoot up from my calf to my thigh and seemed to be en route to my back when in that split second I dropped the bucket.

Something similar had happened before, some 8-10 years ago, on the tennis court, where I was doing absolutely nothing strenuous. Just like this time. It was so painful that I was barely able to walk to the car and then into the house after a painful 10-minute drive from the courts. It was a Friday; I know because I did something I never did, and called in sick for Saturday, on a day we were at half-staff. I also called the Blue Cross hotline, which I had done about every five years, and mostly for my kids. I was assured it was probably a pulled muscle, and sure enough after a couple of days I was back at work.

Back then I had my son to act as a reluctant gopher so I could stay off my injured leg. He was also there to listen to me gripe, which I tend to do when I'm pissed off about not feeling well.

But it's some ten years later, and I'm not just pissed off that I hurt myself doing something that shouldn't have hurt, but I'm here alone and reliving the moment when I thought I felt the pain start to move to my back, and thinking about what I would have done if I had fallen to the deck and not been able to get up. So I have an active imagination. It could happen.

I called Blue Cross, which hotline has gotten more lame as the years since its inception have grown. They have some minimum wage twinkie answering the phone these days, screening before you get to talk to a real nurse. I was in pretty excruciating pain, but I knew I wasn't going to get any help till I had gone through twenty questions. But after I had already identified myself, she – very slowly – informed me that she was going to have to ask me some questions. I took a shallow breath and with astonishing politeness said, “I'm in a lot of pain here, so could you please get on with it?”

For people who answer the phone these days, the emphasis is not getting the caller what they need. It is on being friendly. This is because more often than not, when a customer calls, they are not happy, and chances are pretty good that they are not going to get what they want. So businesses have changed their customer contact model to accommodate this, not by giving people what they want, but by making those poor slobs on the front line be more maddeningly polite, and making their jobs hinge on it. So this young lady who knew her calls were being monitored was going to be upbeat and polite no matter what, and had absolutely no clue about the pain and worry I was trying to convey.

But she kept on. She asked me for my birthdate. I told her it was 7-19-1951, and she said,

“Wow, a summer birthday – that's great!”

I wish I were making that up.

She was also excited about the fact that I lived in South Carolina; I think she either commented on the weather or how pretty it must be, but to be honest, I had stopped listening.

Finally she was done performing and had gotten all the details that she already actually had sitting on the computer in front of her the whole time. She promised me that a registered nurse would call me back in ten minutes.

The registered nurse was certainly an improvement, but after saying she had never heard of my leg pain doing what I claimed it was doing, and ruling out anything BCBS might be sued for if they didn't advise me to go to the ER, I had to ask her if it was okay to take ibuprofen with my other medications and whether I should put ice on it. To be honest, I was just happy to have what I was doing confirmed. I figured the purpose of this hotline was to save BC the cost of hospital care, but if it came down to getting sued for bad advice, they would have recommended the ER.

There was a time when I would have gotten a call back in 24 hours, but this wasn't it.

So when the pain hadn't gone away by Tuesday morning, I called my orthopedist. The last time I saw her was in January and she was getting back from a few days off for the holidays, and she was too busy to talk to me about my concerns about my six-month knee treatments no longer working. I know she has a couple of little kids, and her practice is booming, and I felt concern that she wasn't able to be as good a doctor as she was when she first joined the practice. Not angry, just concern.  And ready to think about finding a new doc.

But I hadn't done it yet, and this time, when I asked for an appointment for the next day, Wednesday, I was told that she had just gotten back from vacation and was booked up. I should wait till the next day and if I was still in pain, I should call my family doctor. Hmmph.

Well, on Wednesday morning, that's what I did. But I didn't want to really believe I was still in that much pain, so I asked for an appointment for Thursday or Friday, and was given 10 a.m. Friday. About an hour later, reality hit and I called back and said that if she couldn't see me right away I would go to the ER. And being the wonderful person that she is, she fit me in that day. And even though she couldn't understand why I was feeling the kind of pain I was feeling, she gave me four different prescriptions, which I was happy to take with me.

I am (she said protesting way too much) not the kind of person that readily takes drugs. This doctor had to frighten me nearly to death (or actual cardiac palpitations) in order to convince me I needed to take Diovan for my blood pressure. And then I had reached a point a year ago where arthritis had flared up so badly in my hands that I couldn't open a water bottle before I was persuaded to go to a rheumatologist. I am now taking Plaquanil, which is this scary stuff that is prescribed for malaria, they don't know why it works for rheumatoid arthritis, and for which I need to see an ophthalmologist once a year just in case the drug begins to make me go blind a rare but actual side effect.

When I had surgery for a torn rotator cuff some six years ago, I took so few oxycodone that I had a bit of a stockpile. Other times when I was in some pain, I considered taking an oxy, but given how evil they are, I had always talked myself out of it.

Not this time. This time I had started taking one-half pill to help me sleep, then moved right along to a whole pill. And when my doctor asked me how many I had left, I lied and told her fewer so she would give me a bigger prescription, just so I didn't run the risk of having to feel that kind of pain at night.

On Friday, when I was still in pain despite all the meds, I called my orthopedist again, and this time asked for an appointment for the following week. Nope. Too busy. And all the partners were too busy as well. But they did agree to put my name up on a sticky note in case there was a cancellation.

Fortunately, by Sunday, I was for the first time feeling like I was definitely on the path to wellness.

I climbed off my porch, three stairs that I have handled cautiously since my knees and I have stopped getting along, and pulled a few weeds. For the first time all week, my little adventure did not cause hours of pain. So I decided to load my car with the recyclables that were going to the dump on Monday. And as I took the second step I missed my footing and didn't fall – I tumbled – off the stairs. You have all probably experienced a fall, and even if it is only a few inches to the ground, you feel like Alice in Wonderland falling through the rabbit hole. My legs both banged up on the brick stairs and my back seemed to hit and then slide along the same edges, and in that especially well-choreographed move, I stopped the fall with my hand.

In those few seconds, I did manage to yell, “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.”

So there I was trying to heal one stupid injury and giving myself another one.

And that is what I am raging about.

The really stupid thing about this whole adventure, besides the fact that I seem to have survived it, is that 1) after injuring myself in an attempt to water my plants, it frigging rained that afternoon, for the first time in weeks; and 2) I'm thinking that it could have been a lot worse and I'm actually lucky; and 3) things happen in threes, so I'm just waiting for the next hit.

So today I'm not going to rage against stupid politics and politicians. I will just settle for being pissed off at getting older and having a body that will routinely and unpredictably remind me of that, and and of course the fact that I will continue to make it worse by doing those stupid human things like falling down a couple of stairs.

I very carefully stood up and checked various parts of my body for injury.  I ascertained that all those body parts that had made contact were scratched and sore but still functioning.  Then I said “fuck it” and I went down those stairs one more time, and this time I hauled up that 25 pound bag of cat litter that was in the car, that is so much cheaper than the ten pound bag.

Cursing the darkness makes it all possible, getting back up and doing it again, and probably surviving once more.  

The Son My Father Never Had

My father could figure out how anything worked.  He could take things apart and put them back together.  He could fix anything.  In other words, he was a man.

To his disappointment I was his firstborn, and a girl.  And then he had another girl.  He didn't think he was disappointed when I came along.  I was pleasant enough, and I didn't give him a hard time till I was a teenager.  My sister doubled down in the rebellion thing.  So eleven years after I was born, he admitted failure and tried again, ending up with a third daughter.

But I was the first.  And my father dealt with it as best he could, but when it came to passing down his talents, I was out of the loop.  I will take some responsibility for that; I can't even imagine trying to learn how to use a lathe, or watch him repair a car.  In my defense, he would typically make my mother stand by him as he worked on the car, so she could listen to him curse when he couldn't get the damned thing loose.  This is probably where I got inspired to join the women's liberation movement.

I was pretty good at things like gardening, and learned to put wallpaper up in my first house, but whenever something broke, I wimped out and called for my husband.  And then, when I was into my forties, and decided to leave my husband, with my two kids, and relocated to a place far, far away, I decided I wanted to buy a "fixer-upper" and then fix it up.  Fortunately, someone talked some sense into me, and I ended up with a pretty, fairly new and modest double-wide.

I did go at learning how to do man-stuff the first year or two.  My husband, good-hearted soul that he is, bought me a drill, a tool-box, and a bunch of other things so I could learn to be a handy-person.  There's a toilet paper holder next to the toilet that wobbles, but damn it, I did it.  I try to avoid using most of those tools these days, because it tends to take me longer to remember how they work than it would take for a guy to fix whatever is broke.  And I have better things to do with whatever time I have left.

Yes indeed, by virtue of age and accompanying wisdom, I'm aware that I have that fear of mechanical objects that women of my generation have.  I'll find someone to do the work if I can, but if I have to do it myself -- and I'm assured by all that I can do it -- it takes a lot of stamina, determination, and internet research before I tackle a project.

My latest adventure in the work of home repair was in the fall, when flames were shooting up from my old grill far beyond what I thought was acceptable.  I bought new briquets.  When I went to replace the briquets I found that what's called the "drip vaporRISER bar" (I may not be handy, but I do compulsively save user manuals) was rusted and needed to be replaced.  When I bought the part I needed and eventually attempted to replace the old one, I discovered that the part underneath it was rusted.  So before I ended up taking a couple of years rebuilding the grill piece by piece, I decided I needed a new one.

When I first moved out here, I was terrified to light the grill, but I really enjoy eating grilled food, so I forced myself to learn.  I wasn't going to let my fear of putting together new shiny objects keep me from getting a grill.  So I shopped and discovered that there are these neat portable grills that people use for picnics and tailgating.  Then I researched those little teensy gas canisters.  Did you know it's cheaper to just refill those little bottles from a 20 lb. tank?

That part of the adventure ended when I learned that all you have to do is turn the big tank upside down to refill the little one.

Then I went to Lowe's and looked at the little grills, and I asked all the right questions.  Like, can I just set this on the concrete porch?  And can I really just use a 20 lb. tank?  And, is there anything else I need to know?

Men will always give you the answer you want.  Which often means they don't know much more than you do.  But I was happy enough and bought the neat little grill.

I left it sitting in the box for quite a few days, and observed it. After I had gotten used to it, I took it out of the box.  After a couple more hours, I looked at the instruction manual. These are all written by men, and often translated from another language.  Even if they aren't they are written by men who have always been better at mechanics than English.

But I did ascertain that the grill needed to be elevated, no more than 36 inches, from the ground.  I thought about calling Lowe's and yelling at the guy that told me I could put it right on the concrete, but determined that I could work this problem out.  It never said how low it could be, and I was not going to go out and buy a table.  So I ruminated about it, strolled around the house, and found a piece of furniture that was made of fairly sturdy wood in my son's room.  Since he doesn't live here anymore, I figured he wouldn't miss it. It was kind of a narrow book case that would be perfect on its side.  I emptied it out, and then took a couple more days to consult with people about whether this would actually work.  And then I got around to actually assembling the grill.  And I set it on the sideways bookcase.  In the house.  Because I still wasn't sure it would work.

It looked pretty good.  I took some pictures:

Then I let a few more days go by.  Now I was worrying about transferring the propane tank from my old grill to the new one.  Yesterday I took some lamb chops out of the freezer.  And today I took the canister off the old grill and with very little difficulty attached it to the new one.

I was told in no uncertain terms, by the manual and by my sister, that I needed to run a soapy solution around the connection to make sure there were no leaks.  Apparently I should have been doing that every year.  Oh, well.  Even though I was assured this was easy, I went to YouTube and found a video.  The first video said I needed to check all the connections.  The second one said I only needed to check the connection at the propane tank.  So I went with that one.  No leaks.

Then it got cloudy, and cold, and windy.

Having reached the limits of even my ability to procrastinate, I thought to myself, hell, the worst that could happen is it could all blow up.  And then I went to my more reasonable fallback philosophy:  There are a lot stupider people than me that do this all the time.  That thought has helped me face a lot of man-stuff hurdles.

So, with the wind whipping up, I fired up my new grill.  I wasn't sure it lit, because I am always convinced that any appliance I try to get to work will not work.  That hasn't been true a lot of the time, it just feels true.  But I turned it off, walked around for a bit, and then came back to it and tried again.  Newfangled thing, I couldn't see a flame.  But I didn't turn it off immediately, and actually sniffed for gas, and found there was no gas smell, and put my hand near the grill and felt heat.  This just might mean success.

But I had to wait 30 minutes before I could grill the first time.  And I watched the wind whip up, sure that the fire would blow out, or the grill would topple over the bench, or some other unforeseen stupid thing would happen.

But it didn't.  I actually cooked my lamb chops.  They were quite nice.

I don't think my father would have been proud of me, because to him it was nothing.  But, having been raised a girl in the 60's, let me tell you it was a damned big deal.

Cat TV

It may say that it's February on the calendar, but my brain is telling me we're still stuck in January. So in the midst of this 10^th or 12^th week of January, I have taken to turning my TV on during the day. And while I was browsing the dregs of entertainment, I happened upon a new TV channel. It's called “Dog TV,” and I was invited to try it.

Figuring that some cute dogs romping around was just what I needed, I gave it a try. Then I gazed in confusion, tipping my head from one side to the other -- puppy-like -- trying to determine what exactly was going on. I eventually realized that Dog TV is not about dogs, it is for dogs. First there is a dog sitting on the floor, at camera level, and then, as the dog looks away, the camera becomes its eyes and we are seeing, presumably, what the dog is seeing. In the segment I was spacing out over, it happened to be a boat sailing on a pond.

Now I had to wonder if this was something that would really captivate a dog. It was certainly boring to me. And, unlike dogs, I'm pretty restricted to two senses when I'm watching TV and hence, more easily amused. I would think dogs would just totally ignore a boat on a pond where they couldn't feel the wind or smell the water or the shore. And if they couldn't run up and down and bark at it, what good would it be?

It occurs to me that whatever crackpot invented this, and those to whom he sold it as a good idea, had just assumed that we could corrupt dogs the way we have corrupted our babies.  Sit them in front of a TV and they will become hypnotized.  I've done it, and I'm pretty sure you've done it.  I did try to limit the number of times I did this to my children, but wasn't it great when you could plop that kid down and go get something done?  But do it even once and you've created a monster.  Turn a TV on anywhere and heads turn and conversation stops, as does a bunch of brain activity, and you all just sit there and watch the moving pictures.

This is like the movie Halloween III. The first time I saw Halloween III, my first baby was three days old. After her birth, I believed the world had just changed so dramatically that there would no longer be a need in my life for the common distraction of television. Until three days later when, honestly, the thrill of watching my newborn sleep had run its course. I hadn't ever seen Halloweens I and II, but if you don't know this, Halloween III for some strange reason doesn't have anything to do with the first two. The plot is that some dastardly geniuses develop a program to destroy all the children in the world. They convince all these children, through the usual means, that they have to watch TV at this particular time on this particular day because it will be really great. When they do, the evil program is run, and the children sit hypnotized until their brains burst.

I can't even begin to tell you how, as a psychologist, this plot has held me in thrall all these years.  And the fact that this movie happened to be on, and I shifted my attention from my infant daughter to watch it, myself hypnotized, well, it would take a book-length blog to give all those dynamics the attention they deserve.

My point being that sitting hypnotized in front of the TV is just something we do.  You can do this with kids, you can do this with adults, so I guess it stands to reason that you can do it with dogs. But my cat, Molly, would have none of it. She has only once in the over two years we have lived together been rapt with TV. She sat so immobile while the Winnie the Pooh movie was on that I was even able to take pictures while she remained oblivious to all but that chubby little cartoon bear.

At night when I usually do my TV watching, she sits on the arm of my recliner for awhile, but only for the purpose of getting scratched and petted, and when she has had enough of both the petting and the nonsense that I am watching, she jumps down and settles herself behind the chair where the TV lights won't annoy her and falls asleep until it's time to wake her up so we can go to bed. Because staring at this box of imperfect light and sound is really quite beneath her.  She would tell you if she could that she has far better options for entertainment.

Cat TV Channel 1

Cat TV Channel 2

Cheese of the Month

Way back when I was fourteen or fifteen, I joined the Doubleday Book Club.  I sent in the postcard, which did not require an adult signature, and began to collect books.  You may not be surprised to hear that after I joined Doubleday, I received and accepted an invitation to join the Book of the Month Club.  It is heartening to know that the Doubleday Book Club still exists, and still offers five for 99 cents if you join.  Book of the Month Club is more upscale, and more expensive, so it's nice to know some things haven't changed.

My mother belonged to the Book of the Month Club when she was in her twenties.  I don't have much that belonged to my mother, but those old tattered books sit proudly on my bookshelf today,

sharing space with my first Doubleday treasures.

My mother's collection includes A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, Clarence Day's Life with Father and Mother, James Hilton's Random Harvest and (my favorite), The Chastity of Gloria Boyd by Donald Henderson Clarke.  My titles were less diverse, all romantic mysteries by Daphne duMaurier, Mary Stewart and Phyllis Whitney.

I loved getting those books, Christmas every month.

Later, in my twenties, I was still on-again-off-again with book clubs, but I discovered a new monthly thrill.  I was in graduate school in Baltimore, and not just loving school for the first time in many years, but having a blast with a fellow student, who spent many hours "drinking and telling lies" as she so brilliantly put it.  Lots of laughs and great stories from those days, including the time we apparently set fire to my Christmas tree with a rum-soaked fruitcake.

Another of my fondest memories was her discovery of the "Cheese-of-the-Month Club."  It was run by a guy whose photo made him look absolutely delightful, and like someone who was absolutely delighted to share his new and delicious cheeses with us every month.  In fact, he was so enthusiastic about this, that he offered free gifts with every order.  So we joined, and we divided up the free gifts, which were different cool cheese knives (which I still own) and shared the cheeses.

It's been quite a number of years since those days.  Our particular cheese-of-the-month club doesn't appear to exist (yes, I would recognize it online in a minute), but there are many others.  They're pretty expensive now, and probably don't include such neat free gifts.  We had a lot of laughs at the expense of the sweet guy who ran the cheese-of-the-month club, and I'm sure he would be delighted at that as well.

A couple of weeks ago, in the thick of January, I received a small replacement part in the mail for my old grill.  With it was a coupon -- actually a very nice card -- offering $100 off a trial order of wines of over $160.  Usually I do have enough will power to toss such offers in the trash, but it was January, I had been dieting, and was cold, hungry and bored, so I explored the site online.

The offer turned out to be hard to refuse.  Order by the case or individual bottles, free shipping over $100, reviews which included one that raved about using her introductory coupon to buy a zillion bottles of wine for a pittance.  I looked at the wines.  I looked at the mixed cases.  I looked at the fine print.  I chose a case marked mixed American wines, white and red, priced at $259 and reduced to $159.99.  I tried to put it in my cart and learned that to get the lower price I had to be an "angel" which apparently meant that I would be "investing" in winemakers who were making new wines.  Now, that is really not me, but the fine print promised that every penny would go to future purchases, and was refundable any time I decided to quit.

What could I do?  I became an angel.  Then, back to my cart, I noticed that I still had to pay $259.  So I opened another window and without logging in I did the same shopping.  After finagling around a bit more, I came up with the $159, but a cheery notice that said I could redeem my $100 coupon with my next purchase.

Stay with me, because this has a happy ending.

I called the toll-free number and a delightful young man promised to help.  He assured me that I should be able to redeem my coupon with the order I had placed.  Ah-ha, he said, the problem was that the order total was $159.99, and before I could bitch about deceptive advertising and hang up, he added the penny and took off the $100.  Now I had a dozen wines originally marked at $259 for $60.00.

But wait! as the old Ronco ads used to say...

The young man asked me what kind of wines I liked, and then added three more, assuring me that I would really like them.

Then I asked if the first $40 monthly payment would be charged right away.  No, he said.  In fact, it would happen in March, and only after I would get an email notice, and the option of declining to be an Angel.

Well, if this was a scam it was such a good one that it didn't even occur to me that it might be a scam until the following week when I was wondering if I really would take delivery on my case of wine.

But it was not a scam.  Here came FedEx, with a friendly driver hauling my huge box and informing me that he had about a dozen of these deliveries today, but mine was the biggest.

My first taste comes tonight.  I have about as much of a discerning palate for wine as I did for books in 1966, or for cheese in 1978.  Which is to say, I'll probably enjoy it quite enough.  I'll let you know.