Happiness and a Plunger

I heard this poem recently. It was read aloud by none other than Garrison Keillor. It reminded me of how often we get so caught up in what's practical, we forget to allow for a little happiness.



Coconut

Bear with me
I want to tell you
something about
happiness
it's hard to get at
but the thing is
I wasn't looking
I was looking
somewhere else
when my son found it
in the fruit section
and came running
holding it out
in his small hands
asking me what
it was and could we
keep it it only
cost 99 cents
hairy and brown
hard as a rock
and something swishing
around inside
and what on earth
and where on earth
and this was happiness
this little ball
of interest beating
inside his chest
this interestedness
beaming out
from his face pleading
happiness
and because I wasn't
happy I said
to put it back
because I didn't want it
because we didn't need it
and because he was happy
he started to cry
right there in aisle
five so when we
got home we
put it in the middle
of the kitchen table
and sat on either
side of it and began
to consider how
to get inside of it

- Paul Hostovsky

They were in Home Depot. Jane, Jessica, and Ricky. No one seems to remember why they were there, but at one point, while walking down the plumbing aisle, no doubt just crossing through, Ricky came upon the toilet plungers. Something struck him and he picked up a small plunger, almost toy-sized, and began putting it against his stomach, then his head and face. He began impersonating Jim Carrey, fighting the plunger for control.

'Can I get this?' Ricky asked. It cost less than $3. Jane agreed and they finished shopping, Ricky amusing himself with his plunger. Later, in the car, Ricky asked if they could stop for ice cream and without thinking, Jane said, "Come on Ricky, it's never enough. I just bought you a plunger!"

Everyone in the car laughed. Especially Jane. And then they went for ice cream.

We still have that plunger, no doubt tucked away with the rest of Ricky's toys, in the attic, as he is now too old to play with them. But it always reminds me to think about my answer before I give it. I would have said no to the plunger. Because I didn't want it. Because we didn't need it. And because, most likely, I wasn't happy.

Why We Lunch

Jane gets the Jimmy Legs. There is a rather well known episode of Seinfeld where Kramer is complaining that his girlfriend "has the jimmy legs". In the same episode, Mr. Costanza admits that his wife has a "jimmy arm." Apparently this phenomenon is real, only they don't call it Jimmy Legs, they call it RLS, or Restless Leg Syndrome. I kid you not.

According to the medical journals, one in ten Americans suffer from RLS, a twitching or nervous discomfort usually settling in the legs and sometimes arms and is usually associated with insomniacs and people with circulation issues. Stress is also a contributing factor.



Symptoms have been described such as "feeling like your legs are being dipped in coca-cola," or "maggots are crawling around under the skin." The result is that they constantly move their legs about. Jimmy Legs.

Jane gets jimmy legs when she's tired and needs to get to bed. That's often how she'll announce that she's tired. "I've got jimmy legs," she'll say. "I've got to go to bed."

But Jane gets a different kind jimmy in her legs. Like when she's been cooped up in the house for too long and needs to get out. I don't mean to the store or the dry cleaner, but someplace where she can enjoy an adult beverage and conversation.

This past Sunday we decided we needed to get out and "blow the stink off". We settled on Smithville, a small historic town about forty minutes north of us. It's basically just a collection of shops (mostly junk) with a few restaurants thrown in. It's someplace to go where there are always bound to be other people. At least we get to pretend we're doing something productive. The reality is, all we ever do is find a place to eat lunch and get a few drinks. Everything else is just there to make us feel like we did something more. For instance, we'll walk around and window shop, sometimes buying something, but the real purpose of the trip is to eat lunch. This is our main activity together.

Where to eat is our other big problem. There are really only so many places we can go and many of them we've either worn out or never liked in the first place. Already we're traveling farther and farther away just for the privilege of ordering beer and wine someplace new. The food is usually the same. Salads. Burgers. Turkey sandwich. Throw in the occasional crab cake, homemade fries and French onion soup, and you pretty much get the idea. It's TGI Friday's without the flare.

We settled on a place we'd never eaten before, an old historic building with two working fireplaces. Normally this would be right up our alley but I'll bet we've walked in, and then right back out, several times before because the minute you walk in you are struck by one undeniable fact: The place is full of senior citizens. The menu is your basic fare, just one notch up from bar food, in portions that allow the elderly to take something home in styrofoam. But for the first time, we came in through the wrong door and found ourselves in a wood-paneled bar with a fireplace large enough to sleep two. The room was cold, the fire seemingly having just been started, and we were the only ones in the room, but we decided to take the table next to the fire and at least have one drink. A few more logs were thrown on the fire (a rotating line of young men took turns feeding the fire), a second round of drinks were ordered and a few more people filed in. Being more or less comfortable at this point, we decided to stay for lunch.

As we sat there, full and happy and on our third round of drinks, I had to laugh. The room we were in very much resembled our own dining room, complete with our seats in front of the fireplace. We had driven close to forty miles to sit in front of the fire and drink beer, which is exactly what we would have been doing had we been home. We'd just moved locations. As Jane often says when we travel to a friend or relative's house, and she finds herself, once again in the kitchen, "Same sink, different location."

We are creatures of habit and our needs are simple. Often what we need is not something new to do, but someplace new to do it. In the summer, we can spend the day at the beach together, simply lying in the sun. Jane can do this and relax. But if we were home lying on chairs in the sun, things that needed to be done would call to her like sirens in the sea. And then she'd start calling out to me. I love the beach.

Stephen King writes in his memoir that when he was drinking heavily (he is now a recovering alcoholic) he had to pour out any unopened beers in the fridge because he knew they would be calling to him all night. That's Jane, only she's a compulsive doer. She finds it difficult to sit still.

In fact, she is constantly confounded by my ability to accomplish so little, at least by her standards. Jane likes to see progress, likes to have the fruits of her labor all around her. She loves the smell of new paint, because like the Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, it smells like victory.

I enjoy sitting. Paul Reiser in his book, "Couplehood" speaks at great length about his enjoyment of sitting. For instance, rather than moving to dislodge the channel changer he's almost definitely sitting on, he'll just deal with the discomfort. He goes on to say, "...now if you understand how affection for sitting, multiply that a couple of times and you can imagine my enthusiasm for lying down." I know what he's talking about.

But my inactivity has a purpose, however flawed in my wife's logic. I can sit in a chair on my computer all day. That's not an exaggeration. I'm talking eight, ten hours. I get up to use the facilities or to refill my coffee cup, refresh my cocktail, or put another log on the fire. But other than that, I'm content to just sit there.

So what do I do, my wife always wants to know? A multitude of things, some worth mentioning, others hardly so. To start with, the Internet is a world wide web to be sure. You can get lost in it and never return. When the mood strikes me, I write. Sometimes I search for and download music. Other times I order books, either the real thing or the downloadable kind. Other times I'm just "window shopping"?looking at things I have no intention of buying but may be fantasizing about buying. It could be anything.

I also belong to several on-line communities: two featuring writing and two featuring photography. I post stories and pictures, comment on other people's stories and pictures, and sometimes, comment on other people's comments on both mine and other people's stories and pictures. It's a full time job. I'm only really home two days a week. It's a wonder I get done as much as I do if you ask me.

Between Jane's Jimmy Legs and my penchant for "sitting and staring at that damn computer" there are days when Jane and I wouldn't see that much of each other, if it weren't for our outings. That's why lunch is so important. We don't NEED to go out to lunch, but it's like neutral ground. She doesn't feel pressured to repaint the upstairs hallway and while I always bring my journal?and often a book?we tend to look at each other and talk.

Although, when you think about it, between the driving to and fro, and the actual meal itself, it does amount to quite a lot of sitting. Which is just fine with me.

In The Shadow of Sandia

The sign was hand lettered and nailed to a pole near the road. It read, "Lost. Two Golden Retrievers." At the bottom was the name and phone number of the owners. It was basically your run of the mill Lost Dog poster but this was Albuquerque, the foothills of the mountains of New Mexico, a place where bears and mountain lions are known to take off with their share of domestic cats and dogs. For these two lost dogs, there was a pretty fair chance that they'd fallen prey to wilder beasts than themselves.



The Southwest is beautiful country but the beauty is a subtle thing; not immediately apparent to someone accustomed to the lush green, and rounded edges of the East. New Mexico can seem a harsh place, dry and barren. There are large tracts of land in which the only thing that grows are the types of tough grasses and scrub brush that can withstand the near desert climate. Even the trees seem stunted by comparison, small, gnarled pines that resemble old arthritic women. But like the Native peoples who occupied this land since before the Christians launched their Crusades, what lives here, is that which can survive.

My first visit here left me with little love of the place. I couldn't see the beauty. And I'm not talking about inner beauty or anything so trivial. I'm talking about God-inspired beauty that can take your breath away. The truth, I've since discovered, is that that sort of beauty is not just here, it's a central part of its essence.

The land, and the people who live here, have a different mindset that only begins to explain their fierce devotion to the land. It is, in fact, a quantum difference from the soft East, and you have to train your mind to appreciate the nuances of life here.

Part of the difference is the speed of life. It's not so drastic as say life in South America or even the Deep South of the United States, but things definitely move at a different pace. It's not at first even a perceptible shift, but more of a feeling that life here has it's own rhythms and cycles and that until you become attuned to them, you are forced to interpret what you see in the light of your own experiences, rather than how they really are.

The first thing you notice is how different the light is here. At over 6500' feet above sea level, the light behaves differently. Unlike other places in the world, especially the terminally overcast Northeast, the sun is a constant entity. While rain does fall, it comes and leaves quickly, leaving an almost fire-cured freshness to everything. But already civilization has begun to change even that. As more and more homes are built, even with their tiny patches of lawn and dwarfed trees, the climate has begun to change. The same is true of other desert climates such as Las Vegas where the average rainfall is significantly higher than it was even forty years ago, a huge leap in terms of changes in weather patterns that historically take hundreds or even thousands of years to change even slightly.

This is still the frontier. It hasn't been tamed by man, or squashed by industry. Back home, most things capable of harming you, with the exception of mosquitoes and poison ivy have been systematically exterminated.

We don't stand much for danger in our nation's oldest section of the world. We leave that for the frontier. In the East, we deal with the occasional snowstorm of six to eight inches and we endure the weeks of sunless winter days, but other than that, we don't really have to deal with a lot of adversity.

We don't have earthquakes or tornadoes. For the most part, we don't see floods or forest fires. No mudslides or hurricanes threaten our mobile homes. And avalanches are unheard of. About the worst we can expect are French Canadian tourists. I know that sounds terrible, but I know some people who would argue that they'd prefer riots to French Canadians. There are times when I would agree.

But today, I'm in wild country. In the past six months, there have been several bear attacks within an hour of where I now sit. One occurred in the mountains near here, where a grandmother of ninety-eight was attacked and killed while cooking beans in her kitchen. Now I don't know a lot about bears, but from where I come from, that's pretty brazen.

Another incident was reported within months of the elderly woman being killed, where a man was forced to shoot a bear that he found in his house. I'm not a member of the NRA, nor do I support unconditional rights for gun owners, but this seems to me to be a perfect example of why Americans should be able to own guns.

Sure, England doesn't have the guns we have, nor the violent crime that goes with it, but you don't hear about anyone in Nottingham Forrest getting eaten by bears while eating fish and chips in the kitchen. The founding fathers knew we had bears, mountain lions and the occasional French Canadian when they wrote the constitution. We may be a unified and sophisticated nation, but much of our great country is still pretty wild.

Just a few months before my brother-in-law Patrick and his wife Hae-Jung had their baby, they were hiking just a few miles from where I now sit at the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. Patrick was walking ahead of Hae-Jung with the dogs when he came to an arroyo, a kind of dry creek bed, and came face-to-face with 400lb black bear.

No matter where you live, you never really expect to run into a bear. At first, Patrick thought it was a dog and looked up to see if he could locate its owner. Then he took another look, and a good look it was since he was only standing about six feet away, and he realized that he was starring into the face of a bear with his pregnant wife only several yards behind him.

Fortunately, the bear decided there were better places to be right at that moment and he took off up the mountainside.

The wild nature of this place can touch you in unexpected ways. I don't know if they can be described as good or bad. The human race, in general, has the tendency to judge the world around us as good and bad in terms of how it effects us personally. Sometimes, nature is not good or bad. It just is. In this instance the bear went its way and my brother-in-law went his. No reason for it really, just the way it happened.

But surely this is beautiful country, where the sun shines almost constantly, the humidity is low and the sunsets brilliant. Perhaps it is the harshness that helps one appreciate the delicate nature of its beauty. I don't honestly know. I'm not sure if I have an answer, but I have hope.

A few miles down the road from the first lost dog sign, we came upon another sign; it read, "Found: Two Golden Retrievers."

I don't know if these two signs were related. I don't know if the people who made these two signs ever found each other. Within a few miles of one another were both the seekers and the keepers of the lost. Did they ever find one another? I don't know. But I hope so.

Meanwhile the sun sets to the west and reflects across the Sandia Mountains in brilliant patterns of light and we sit here at the foothills and watch the stars come out one by one. It is a magnificent gift from God and for this I am grateful. There is so much about this world I don't understand. So much about a loving God that seems contradictory with the harsh reality of our lives. But tonight, I sit beneath the same stars that Abraham saw and thank God for the grace to see another day.

It is so little and yet, it is enough. Or so I hope.

The End Of Days

The cicadas are singing in the trees, a cool breeze blows gently through the screens where I sit, and the smell of woodsmoke fills the air. It's September 5, 2005 - Labor Day - and in less than 18 hours, I will once again re-enter the world of the gainfully employed.



I've been on vacation since a week ago last Friday - ten days. It's been glorious. The weather was especially cooperative with temperatures hanging in the low eighties and a relative lack of humidity, giving the sense that summer is ending and autumn is on its way. Today has been the coolest so far, with clear, deep blue skies caused by the low humidity. It's like nature is giving us a glimpse into the future, when the days will shorten, and the nights will become cooler.

I had it all this week, with a few rainy days to start it off, followed by the hot, humid days we normally expect this time of year, and ending with this wonderfully rare, autumn-like day. Almost everyday was beach day and we took full advantage, surfing nearly every day and fishing when we weren't surfing. But that's the most ambitious I got. I didn't really take many pictures, nor do any writing whatsoever: two things I had expected to do. I did, however, do a good bit of reading. (Blue Like Jazz, A Walk In The Woods, Dress Your Family corduroyory And Denim)

In effect, I did what I could which was not much.

I did not think I would be ready to return to work, and in many ways I'm not, but the last few days, being such beautiful weather are almost enough to get me through the end of the year. Weather like this, absolutely has the power to lift my spirits. As much as I like summer, it's the end of the dog days of summer that make my heart sing.

The children will return to school. The air will grow crisp and the nights will descend sooner. But in the not too distant future, I will arrive home to find my children at the kitchen table, my wife stirring something delicious on the stove, a fire in the fireplace and my chair in front of it. I will pour myself a drink, my wife will join me in an opposite chair and we'll talk about Spring. Won't it be grand.

A Skunk In Goshen

My sister in law, Bernadette, called from her house down the street to inform me with some urgency that she thought Seamus "might have been sprayed by a skunk."

Seamus is my dog and he has long, long, long, very thick fur. He's half Chow, half German Shepard. Might have been sprayed by a skunk was not a place I wanted to ever go. Was there any question?

Bern had been over at our house with my two nieces, Isabelle and Margot, to watch reruns of "The Waltons" and when they left, they thought it might be nice to have Seamus come to their house for a sleepover. How nice.

At some point in the evening after they got home, Bern thought it might also be nice if she and Seamus took a walk in their field behind the house. I now question the wisdom of this decision.



When I got the call, she wasn't sure where Seamus was. This alarmed me. She saw what she believed to be an all-white skunk. Seamus had chased it. Now she couldn't find the dog.

I informed her that I would come right down, so I got in my car and raced down. My first concern was that the dog was okay, but when I got there and exited the car, the entire area reeked unbelievably. Of course, Seamus was right there to greet me so there was no mystery as to where he was. Then of course, there was the smell.

The first thing I did was to grab a hold of his neck, which was wet, and then hold my hand up to my nose. Now while the entire area absolutely reeked of skunk, the hand that I held up to my nose smelled terribly, but not like you'd think. In fact, believe it or not, at first I wasn't exactly sure he'd been sprayed. It smelled more like urine.

I was wrong.

I've since read that it doesn't take long to suffer from what scientists call, "olfactory fatigue." The smell of skunk spray is so strong, that almost instantly you can't smell it. The brain blocks it out. All you who doubt this may come visit me sometime, and I'll take you skunk hunting. You walk in front of course.

Regardless, it didn't take long to figure out that:
1. Seamus had in fact been sprayed.
2. Bernadette had let him into the house afterwards
3. That her house smelled like fresh skunk spray.
4. Sooner or later, we were going to have to give him a bath.

My night was getting better by the minute.

So we took him to the outdoor shower where we proceeded to lather him up with shampoo, especially around the neck and head which, fortunately for me, was at my end of the dog body. I really do get all the breaks.

When we were done, Seamus might have been a little cleaner, but I don't think he smelled any better. I on the other hand, decidedly smelled much worse. I can only imagine what Bern smelled like.

I borrowed Bern's Honda Element and drove Seamus back to our house where I was confident he could at least sleep the night off in our backyard (he certainly wasn't coming into the house).



When I walked into the living room and greeted my 13-year-old stepson Ricky and his friend, they nearly gagged. I had obviously already achieved olfactory fatigue, so I was a bit surprised. I promptly threw my clothes in the washing machine.

"Hmmm," I thought, "I guess I really do have some of it on me."

I woke Jane up and informed her of my predicament, after which she informed me that the best course of action was tomato juice. Then she rolled over and went back to sleep.

Unfortunately, we did not have tomato juice. But we did have V-8. It would have to do. So I took a six-pack of little tiny cans from the fridge and headed to the shower.

I've got to tell you that V-8, direct from the fridge, is quite cold, and not particularly pleasant. And as I found out afterward, completely ineffective.

Even in my sorry state of olfactory fatigue, I could tell that I hadn't quite gotten rid of the smell, so I decided to go online and see what people who'd gone before me had done.

Here's the first thing I read:

"TOMATO JUICE DOES NOT WORK. Bathing an animal in tomato juice seems to work because at high doses of skunk spray the human nose quits smelling the odor (olfactory fatigue). When this happens, the odor of tomato juice can easily be detected. A person suffering olfactory fatigue to skunk spray will swear that the skunk odor is gone and was neutralized by the tomato juice. Another person coming on the scene at this point will readily confirm that the skunk spray has not been neutralized by the tomato juice."

Thanks. I was coming to that conclusion on my own. What next?

Well, for all you who are wondering, and I'm sure there are plenty of you, here is the proper way to rid A DOG of skunk odor:

1 quart (or liter) of 3% Hydrogen Peroxide, H2O2.
You must use fresh (unopened) hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) as hydrogen peroxide eventually turns into water (H2O).
? 1/4 cup (50 ml.) of Baking Soda
? 1 teaspoon (5 ml.) of Liquid Soap
? 1 pair of plastic or latex gloves

Great. A solution for a dog. Nice touch on the gloves there. At this point I was desperate. I'd try anything.

First, I found some hydrogen peroxide in the medicine cabinet. One quarter of a small bottle. Certainly nothing close to a liter, but what the hell. Second, some baking soda. Finally dishwashing liquid.

Screw the measurements. I emptied everything I had into a bowl, swished it around and began scrubbing my hands and arms (the parts that, as far as I could tell, had been effected).

I don't think it worked. It was supposed to bubble and foam. It didn't.

First off, the directions called for FRESH H2O2. Who knows how long that crap had been sitting in my bathroom. Years? Second, I didn't have nearly enough. In another post, I read that the above concoction is good for a dog the size of a Jack Russell Terrier. I am decidedly bigger. Also, just in case you're wondering, this treatment can also bleach the hair of the dog permanently.

At this point in the story (if you're still reading this), you might be asking yourself, why on earth am I up at 12:24am writing? Well to be honest, I can't stand the smell in my nose, which I assume is also on my body, and I don't really know what to do with myself. I have lived for many years in the boonies and the smell of skunk is not unknown to me. I have even been around my fair share of sprayed dogs. But NEVER have I experienced anything like this. Seamus must have been dead square in the skunk's path when he was sprayed. Up close and personal, as it were. As far as I can tell, his entire head and neck were sprayed full on. I must have gotten this all over my hands. So did Bern. The effect is overwhelming and completely indescribable.

So, for those of you whom I work with, I'm not going to be able to come into work tomorrow. Nor, do I think you'd want me to. For the rest of you, I simply thought you might like a laugh at my expense.

Tomorrow, when the pharmacies open, I will be going myself, or sending a family member, to get the ingredients for a de-skunking bath. First, I'll do the dog, then maybe my sister in law, then me. Wish me luck.

The F-Troop Makes A Move

"Oh, man," Bob said as he set the box down, "look at this."

"What is it," I asked.

"It's an old captain's trunk," he said and began to pick out small treasures that clearly meant something to him. There's nothing like moving all your earthly belongings to cause you to pause throughout the day and take a small mental trip down memory lane.

"Check this out," Bob said and held a small silver medal out to me. It looked like something from the civil war. I half expected a revolutionary story about a great-great grandfather or something.

"What is it," I asked again.

"It's Bear's first tag," Bob said. Bear is a Chocolate Labrador. Bob held up the dogtag and smiled like a proud father.



The Farrgintons, or the F-Troop as we call them, moved from Tenino, Washington this past December, but had been renting Jane's sister Bern's house. Bern's summer house is less than a quarter mile down the street from us, but since she spends all but the summer in Zurich, Switzerland, she rented it out to old friends. Actually, the funny thing about this, is that this is how we met the Farringtons in the first place.

Many years ago, when Bern was married to her first husband Allen, they had a house in Cape May but were spending the winter down in St. Croix. Bob and Donna had just moved to Cape May and needed a place to stay. They rented Bern's house and that's how Donna and Jane met. For the next few years, they had babies at nearly the same time, one after another. They went to the beach together, trips to the woods to go camping, or just hanging around the backyard pool, all the while dragging along nursing newborns. Of course, I was not yet in the picture. That would come later.



But back to this move. For Bob, this would be his fourth move from coast to coast. He was born in Belgium, but grew up on Long Island. There's saltwater in his veins, and he's never been too far away from the coast, although in Washington, they lived more in the mountains than at the beach. But here they were, once again, back in Cape May County, living in the lowcountry.

The house they found is in the village of Woodbine, NJ, an historic old town that still retains a certain amount of small-town charm. It's a little bit country, especially compared to the hustle and bustle of the coastal shore towns like Stone Harbor, Avalon, and Cape May. This is farm country, where you're more likely to pass a horse than a multi-million dollar beach house. The house is old, meaning it has some history, and the street is lined with trees that have been there longer than anyone living in the homes.



Max and I had gone that morning to get the truck. Technically, Max is Bob's mortgage broker, but in reality, he's more like a lost puppy Bob found and brought home. He's been following Bob around ever since. Of course, they'd been feeding him daily so he's had good reason to come around. Typical stray.

This isn't all that unusual for Bob. He collects stuff: tools, loose screws, old chairs, and every once in awhile?people. According to Donna, he doesn't throw anything out either, and after helping him move, I'd have to agree with her.

At one point, on the second day of the move, he commented on what a shame it was to throw away all these good boxes. We all just looked at him.

"What?" he cried. "They're good boxes."



But say what you will about Bob, he's got the energy of a sixteen-year-old, and according to him, the mentality as well. Bob works hard, plays hard and nearly always has a smile on his face. His enthusiasm is contageous, and his excitement about whatever he's doing is undeniable.

I'd like to believe that this is Bob's last move for awhile, and until his kids finish school, it just may be. But I also know enough about Bob to know that one day, and I don't know when that day will be, he'll sell everything, buy a boat and sail off into the sunset with his wife and his dog. I just hope they stay around for a little while.