It's never on the BINGO card

The three of us were about to head to Maine. It is a trip we’d taken so many times over the last seventeen years that I imagined, the kids, now that they could share the driving, would be able to find their way to the old homestead just as if they were hatchling turtles making their way to the sea - seemingly by instinct.  

Not that I would wager any serious money since the route has recently diverted through Boston for the collection of my firstborn. 

But generally, we know all there is to know about the extended family vacation to the point that we have created a game of BINGO from the possibilities:

How far past the expiration date is this cottage cheese?

DOH! The dog got skunked!

Has anyone seen Uncle Erik?

Will Dad wake himself with his snoring?

Most grocery store trips in one day!

DOH! Someone goes to the ER!

Who hid the loudest YATZEE cup?

Who’s turn to wash dishes?

Who’ll be the first to storm off?

Does anyone want to split a beer?

She’s probably clutching her hastily printed card as she waits on the stoop of her dorm for our arrival. She’s looking in the opposite direction as we pull up. She still doesn't see us as I ease the car into a prime space while traffic jockeys around us.

Her face lights up when she sees us and realizes she won’t have to schlepp her bags and an oversized pillow through the bus lane into the street and try to toss them and herself into the car as it's still moving.

I bet she didn’t have this on her BINGO card. 

“There’s an old myth that claims Boston streets were designed by the paths taken by cows and wild game,” the girl said as she hugged me at the curb. “Might have been a toddler flinging spaghetti at the walls as their mother made train sounds with the fork. … But good on you for finding a parking space. Mind if I drive?”

That was on my BINGO card.

She needed the practice. When she returns in two weeks, she will drive herself and keep the car for the commute to an internship inconveniently located at the tail end of one of the pasta strands outside of public transit range. 

Traffic had stopped on Storrow Drive and my daughter was delighted. “I know if Dad were here he’d be climbing the walls, but inching along like snails will only help my city-driving confidence. I feel like I won’t be so white-knuckly (and neither will you) if everyone has to drive slow on the Toobin Bridge.”

She wasn’t wrong … I hadn’t hit the imaginary brake on the passenger side once since she eased out from the curb (where we would later come to believe her brother’s wallet must have landed having slipped from his pocket as he obliged his sister’s request to move to the backseat and let me ride “shotgun.” 

He didn't have that on his BINGO card, and neither did I, even though his losing of wallets wasn’t exactly a rare occurrence. I had made sure all of his shorts had zippered pockets in hopes of breaking the pattern.

Which, I suppose happens naturally once you make the BINGO game official.

Because as much as we can guess the familiar quirks of our families, Maine itself seems to toss in the wildcards:

Someone mistakes Mom for “Mrs. Bush”

You will never guess which famous Scottish comedian moved in next door.

Hey? Is this car door handle yours?

And finally: 

“Sure, I’d love to split a beer!”

 

Maine wins again!

Heat wags

The first day of summer coincided with a heat wave that had undulated between the low 70s and the high 90s for three days. 

I hate this weather. I’ve made no secret of it. I wear long pants and long sleeves. I wear a hat and slather any exposed skin in sunscreen I call “liquid” clothes. If only someone made SPF 3000 … I’d buy it even though I know it would have the truth-in-advertizing veracity of the wide-legged pants I bought just because they fit AND they claimed to be a Size 2. 

I tried to put it out of my mind. I felt I was so successful in this endeavor – thanks to the miracle of the elderly, barely-functioning window units my husband has dutifully schlepped up and down the stairs, and in and out of windows, twice annually – that the wall of air that roared in startled me.

The dog, I believe, shares my ability to suspend disbelief. At least, that’s what I thought as she hopped up and down, barking at the door until I opened it and the stifling air rushed inside. 

For an instant, she froze. If the air was this hot, how hot would the patio stones be? Maybe her bladder could wait a little while longer. 

She waits for me to roll out the red beach towel - the one that has been hanging on the fence since last year. Its terry nap flattened and faded from being out in the elements all that time. Once unfurled, she trots across it to the grass underneath the yard’s only shade tree. I close the door behind her, but she watches me through the window. Staring me down the way she does when other people pet her … reminding me with her eyes this is how she likes it and maybe I should learn a little something. 

She doesn’t break our gaze as she relieves herself. This is not a walk. It doesn’t absolve me of the routine she’s come to expect under normal circumstances. The one in which she can take an inventory of the varmints multiplying between the property no matter the season.  Who am I to hinder her from chasing away the birds I’ve tried to identify through the songs they sing with the magic of Merlin.

As I wait, a survey of the birds of the northeast appear: American Robin, House Wren, Chimney Swift, Goldfinch, Red Tailed Hawk. Canada Goose? I marvel as they twitter away, seemingly unperturbed by the stickiness of the air. 

A cardinal lands near the terry carpet, she dips her head and drinks from a puddle I was beginning to think was a mirage. I don’t remember the last time it rained.

The dog stays right where she is. She doesn’t give chase.

It occurs to me that maybe she hasn’t seen the bird. She hasn’t taken her eyes off of me where I’m standing near the door.

She is not taking any chances. And I don’t test her. It wouldn’t be nice to hide from her as if she’d have to stay outside in this furnace of a world until I got my coffee.

Why are you drinking coffee in this heat, human? Are you crazy?

I am. But she is not. When she trots back inside she heads straight for her water bowl and, finding it wanting for something, trots over to the refrigerator and looks at me and the ice dispenser.

She takes two cubes and wags her tail.

Hail Mary, full of rage

Every time the phone rings, I say a little prayer. Not a literal prayer with words for gods or saints who may be listening from the heavens. But an earnest hope in the fleeting moment before I answer that whoever is calling has merely fair to middling news. 

It’s not as if I cross myself or genuflect, though it does feel like a brief encounter with the superstition that is the last remaining trace of my Catholic school faith. 

And while I believe that none of our problems are new, time and pressure have a way of making us feel as if they are not only novel but also daunting.

It also doesn’t help that the bombardment of news chickens falling from the media sky has us feeling like it’s all just too hard.

Of course, we know we have to do the hard things. We know there may even be some satisfaction with accomplishing the difficult tasks we procrastinate. But there seems to be no end to the hard things that could be easier.

Maybe we always felt this way, too: anxiety and self-doubt can lead us over the bridge to anger, setting a fire that will burn it behind us.

I was thinking about all of this recently as I held on the line for the next available representative, not entirely reassured that my call was, in fact, important to them.

Nor did I believe that if I left my number, and without losing my place, a customer service support staff would call me back.

Still … I had enough to do in the meantime that I left the call to faith.

Not long before this line, I stood in another line at the DMV, having already made a second trip to the location because I didn’t have the right signatures, slowly realizing I may have to make a third pilgrimage for another third-party affirmation buried in the small print.

 And as the pent-up air exited my mouth in an audible sigh, the most amazing thing happened. Someone else in that very same room lost their composure and started a tirade of screaming and swearing that was nowhere near as funny as The Dad in “A Christmas Story” shaking a wrench in the air after he walked into the kitchen – from trying to fix the “clunker” in the basement – to find at the Bumpus’s Turkey-stealing dogs – made it look.

This rage wasn’t a laughing matter. 

Yet, from the look on the face of the agent assisting me in my registration conundrum, it was something that happened all the time. Moreover, it was something she could readily expect from just about anyone, including me.

I suddenly regretted the sound of my body’s depressurization. 

I regretted not keeping a closer leash on my feelings, but I quickly hushed my instinct to bark and growl.

In that moment I could see the bigger picture and my small, privileged place in it. Eventually, this will all be solved one way or another, and fighting the person helping me wasn’t going to help either of us.

It is our lot in life, sometimes, to be inconvenienced. The only thing we can control is how we react when hardship, or customer service, calls back.

Grass is always greener

As a kid, I remember begging my father to let me mow the lawn. 

It was a chore that girl children didn’t usually pull from the roster of odd jobs via the blind selection of various length straws. 

My father initially resisted, not because he had any hardwired thoughts about women doing men’s work but because I was small and the machine was heavy and cumbersome. He didn’t want to risk an accident.

A part of me also suspected he enjoyed his weekly routine of swearing at the mower until it started; following it around the yard for the better part of an hour before the sunset on Friday evenings; and finally, celebrating his achievement with the silent company of our dog as he relaxed in a folding chair, drinking in a beer along with the fresh scent of cut grass. 

The year he finally dragged the old Montgomery Ward mower to the curb and ponied up for a cherry red Craftsman self-propelled model was the year he finally let me give lawn mowing a spin.

Of course, I had to read and regurgitate his forty-five-hour dissertation on equipment safety as it pertains to preemptive detritus checks, the correct angle to address various lawn elevations, slopes, and pitches, not to mention a 10-point OSHA level decree on the required clothing, footwear, and ear protection necessary for buzzing around our quarter-acre lot.

“Just close the bar on the handle and pull the …,” he said as he demonstrated. The machine drowned out his voice as it roared to life. Just let the bar go and it will stop the blade.”

When it was my turn to let her rip, he insisted I show him the technique no less than seven times before he parked himself in his chair on the lawn to supervise.

I can’t remember if this annoyed me, though I imagine it did. It was forever etched in my memory along with the great model train tutorial of 1975, wherein he had explained, in no small detail, how to operate the beloved Lionel set of his childhood. It astounded him that we had wandered off to watch Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom when he was finally ready to hand over the transformer.

“I’m ready,” I said as he stepped aside. I pulled the cord and started following the mower trying to match my father’s even lines. Tipping up the front wheels and turning on a dime, as I had seen him do hundreds of times, I plopped it down just shy of the fresh edge each time.

I think of those days often now … as I set out on the riding mower on what seems like the back forty in comparison.

I never matched his lawn barbering skills, though he never mentioned the zigs and zags, or the 

Now that we’ve upgraded our tools, I have taken the job back from my son, who toiled away for tufts of grass I left along the rows like little green orphans. 

years under the electric tether of a non-power assisted push mower (which needed three charges just to get through the front yard.

I never commented on the boy’s wiggly lines, either.

The grass is always a little greener when someone else is mowing.

Safe Places

 Bedtime was near. I could sense it without looking at my watch or considering the color of the sky outside the window. Despite the upbeat music and constant commotion of the movie, drowsiness weighed down on my eyelids and edited whole scenes right out of my consciousness. This is usually the point at which my husband – having sacrificed a movie with car chases and explosions for my wish for complicated characters and a storyline – will ask if I’m falling asleep.  

Which I will deny out of habit.

And next, he will quiz me on what the protagonist just said.

Of course, I will have no memory of what had transpired.

That’s when a barrelling noise rolled down the stairs and into the room.

This time it was my son who was confronting me, though with a sudden and curiously specific memory:

“Hey … remember when you found my silver bracelet in the hotel room last year sometime and you zipped it into one of your suitcases because you thought I would lose it?”

“Uhhhh. …”

“Do you have it?”

 

As my husband switches off the television and starts his nightly security checks, I pull myself off the couch and to my feet.

I am now fully awake. 

A different movie spools through my brain. I can see the flat-link chain in all the places he’s left it … counters, boxes, the edge of the sink. Some places are familiar … the guest bath, the kitchen, even a toolbox he made in Woodshop that lives in the mudroom and is mostly employed with corralling winter hats and gloves through all seasons. 

I remember the thought that went through my mind when I found his one beloved piece of jewelry dangling from the edge of a shelf in a bathroom nine members of our extended family shared on vacation.

“Hey … listen. I’m just going to put this in my *gherghfunklepperdu, OK. I don’t want you to lose it,”

What is a *gherghfunklepperdu you might wonder?

Well, let’s just say at the time I collected the chain, and slipped it into the *gherghfunklepperdu, it had a more precise name and location.

Half a year later, having combed over every inch of the three bags that were photographically proven to have been among my allotted luggage, and the numerous smaller bags that I pretend keep me organized, I can only conclude that a gherghfunklepperdu is what happens with the details our fixed bearings have gone fuzzy.

This isn’t the first time he’s lost this particular piece. Nor is the first time he’s allowed me to be its trustee, only to have it turn up just as missing.

Which doesn’t give him any more hope in having it turn up one day.

Maybe next time instead of putting stuff we don’t want to lose in a “safe place out of the way,” we could just put it in a place that we have to search more often … like something that has a name like The Important Paper File or a Toiletry Kit or Mom’s Wallet.”

“We’ll find it,” I reassure him, more out of hope than confidence.

My son, pragmatic as he is, shrugs his shoulders.

“Don’t lose sleep over it.”