Torch bearers

 I don’t know what it is lately, but the mice seem to be winning.

Earlier this year, the eastern meadow vole -- as field mice are called in the Northeast, or Microtus Pennsylvanicus, if you speak Latin -- turned my mother-in-law’s new car into their very own brick house by gnawing through layers of tasty and colorful insulation and sharpening their teeth on the wires within, shredding them and six thousand dollars in repairs. 

Recently, the same mice (or maybe their cousins) had turned a standard driving, fully electric riding mower into a literal zero turn. We discovered this when my husband, trying to be helpful and mow her meadow, couldn’t maneuver the machine out of its parking space. It wouldn’t move even a centimeter in any direction.   

He and I spent the better part of an hour scratching our heads and wondering if somehow the parking brake had remained engaged despite all electronic indicators to the contrary. When he popped an access panel on the floor of the mower, the evidence was clear: he had found the pungent smell of mouse excrement and the sparkling confetti of plastic dust where wires had been.

“How do you know how to do things?” his mother marveled after her son had disappeared for a few minutes and reappeared with a bag from the local hardware store containing a length of wire and a bottle of rodent repellant. 

“Necessity.” 

After we pulled out a wire crimper from a household multi-tool kit and bandage scissors from a first-aid kit, depositing each of them into his outstretched hand with the efficiency of scrub nurses, his repairing of the assembly seemed to go like clockwork. In no time, the patient was tearing around the yard and mowing down grass as if nothing had happened.

But it did seem like a minor miracle.

Until we returned home and found our son’s car, having sat idle for a week in the driveway, wouldn’t start.

When I arrived car-side, telling the kid his dad was on the way with jumper cables, he voiced his skepticism that the problem would be solved by recharging.

“Honestly … it doesn’t sound like the problem is the battery. It eventually starts, but it doesn’t stay on.”

Maybe it’s just coincidence or a spate of bad luck, but while I opened the hood to look around – doing the only things I know to do, like pull out the dipstick and check the oil – my son pointed to a gnawed clump of wires poking out of a plug-like device in the center of the engine. “Does that look like the work of mice?”

“You aren’t going to believe this,” I yelled to his dad as he approached with the cables. “Looks like while the cats were away, the mice did play.”

“That’s an oxygen sensor. I won’t be able to rewire that, but I can order a part. It shouldn’t be that difficult to replace. You can do it yourself.”

I could tell from his expression our son didn’t quite agree, but he was game to try.

And when the part came in, it was the boy who realized it and had to go back because it wasn’t the right one. And it was the kid who took the mangled old part to the shop to make the correct exchange.

After that, it took him no time to make the repair.

I’m fairly certain that, years from now, if his mother-in-law asks him how he learned how to do these things, he might be tempted to tell her it was “YouTube,” or that "mice make excellent teachers," but he will know his dad had something to do with it, too.

A silent salute

For decades, he’s been a daily part of our Maine vacations. A tall man wearing a hat, smiling broadly as his stout dog bumped along behind him in the sand.

Always quick with a smile and small talk.

We’ve come to regard him as the most Magnanimous man on the beach. 

Sometime around 2016 his hat turned a bright red even though his outward demeanor stayed the same.

Besides the words “Make America Great Again” embroidered on his ball cap, he never said anything political. 

He just gave compliments about the Goodness of your dog as it crossed his path. 

During the race in 2020, I noticed our magnanimous friend had changed some of his swag. In addition to his red hat, he had planted a flag on the tailgate of his vehicle that proselytized a second presidential term. 

Now he’d become MAGAnimus. 

His smile never wavered even when his flag turned blue and he cheered on “Brandon” with a cheeky wink and nod. But I’d noticed by this point that he’d stopped walking the length of the beach and planted himself in a low-slung chair within eyesight of his flashy slogan mobile. 

To my dismay, beachgoers have always gravitated toward him — a king, so to speak, holding court. 

Always a steady stream of them keeping up affable banter, all while seemingly ignoring the man’s increasingly blistering slogans: the latest of which unfurled a six-foot sentiment  -  “F🇺🇸K Biden” - into our consciousness with the help of the ocean breeze.

Relief is a feeling I didn’t expect to have as I deciphered the sentiment. He has been waging this war so long, he can’t stop fighting.

I know after all these years, the better part of valor was to resist being the fish who ran with that bait. 

Instead of wearing a response on my sleeve or a picket sign, I have tended to seethe quietly, keeping my distance as best I can at least as far as the tides will allow. I have let my expression smooth over whenever I have to enter his kingdom … to access the stairs …or collect a specimen my dog may have deposited nearby.

But I can tell you it’s been impossible not to wonder what Thanksgiving dinner sounds like where he breaks bread. Is he surrounded by kindred spirits? Does it devolve into arguments and hard feelings? Or is it filled with people who talk about the weather in passing, and keep their distance the rest of the year?

It helps a little to feel sad for him since I can only picture a gathering not unlike the one on the beach - one in which dogs and pleasantries can’t obscure the rage and discomfort. 

I don’t think he’s a sad character, though. 

Truth be told, I’ve looked forward to seeing MAGA man camped out there more than I care to admit. The power of his insults is not all, but not entirely unconsuming.

Not that my vexation kept me from admiring the power of the waves, or the magic of sandcastles, or the joy of my kids taking off head first into the surf. Even the faint smell of funk in the air reminds me that not everything has to smell of roses. Maybe one day I should thank him since he reaffirmed for me that polite conversation can almost completely obscure any middle fingers thrust your way.

I'm sure of it

Another moving day. The fourth time in two years. 

Dorm life, she has been warned, would be somewhat nomadic.

She had taken to heart administrative advice: pack light. Be ready, with less than a semester’s notice, to pack everything you own into a bin not much larger than a shopping cart and wheel it clear across campus if need be. 

During freshman year she had changed rooms three times, from a triple in Boston to a hotel room in Greece; and back to a campus high-rise for a few weeks that summer. Sophomore year she had stayed put: living her best life in a fifth-floor studio with two roommates, their own kitchen, and a balcony (big enough for a flower box) overlooking the campus.

She loved that place.

Not that she didn’t gush about the next move: to an upper-class dorm suite that would rival any upper-class neighborhood’s three-bedroom apartments. And looking at the photos she sent on moving day, I could see the place had a modern vibe, with walls of windows and an open-concept living space. The new apartment would surely be the best city dwelling she might ever live in for the comparatively “bargain” rate of college room and board.

But she didn’t seem in any rush to get her belongings packed up and moved over there. The day before her ID tag would cease working at one address and fling open another, she hadn’t packed up even one thing.

I imagined she would miss the old place. It’s tall ceilings, hardwood floors, and burnished woodwork. It was the place that sealed her as an adult. Not only because she had to clean a toilet of her own, but more because she learned how to cook on a gas stove and laughed long into the night at the dinners she and her roommates had hosted.

The salad days were evolving into souffle nights.

I could understand other reasons for her hesitation, as well.

She would be the first to arrive and would have to practice living single for almost a month before she’d have a whole new slate of housemates.

Still, I had offered to help get her things from one street to another. I volunteered to expend significant amounts of elbow grease on floors or windows or whatever dust had been overlooked by past occupants.

I knew the terrain. I could help lug things up and down stairs. I could disassemble and reassemble as if I were fluent in the language of IKEA Directions. 

I set the tone of my voice to "unnaturally exuberant" and delivered the message:  “Not only will I happily drive five hours in the rain and darkness just to see your new place, I will scrub the stalagmites out of your oven if necessary.”

But she had declined. 

She had all the help she needed from her college friends. 

Which is why I was surprised when my phone started lighting up with texts. 

“How do you work a dishwasher?”

“There are 235 people who live in this building and guess how many washing machines work? THREE! I’ve filed my first request for a work order …. WE!”

“WHY ARE THERE MOUSETRAPS HERE? EWWWW”

"And oh man … there’s a light post outside my bedroom window THAT. NEVER. GOES. OUT! I didn’t get to sleep until 2 a.m.”

“Guess what time I woke up this morning? 5 a.m. Guess why? That garage door under my apartment is where they store the garbage. And Thursday is garbage day.”

“At least I hope it’s just on Thursdays. I don’t know, but a girl can dream.”

As she took a breath, I laughed. It felt like I was with her in more than spirit.

“I think I’m going to love it there.”

I was sure of it.

His story lessons

 The conversation in the car was lively. 

With his father driving and me in the backseat, my son rode shotgun as we drove four hours west. 

“Can you imagine getting to Buffalo before the interstate system? How about the canal system? Major trade center of the whole #%*€€?!> world. The canal system was made so merchants from the South could bring goods up North without traveling along the coast. The steam-powered boats traveled relatively fast up the canal -- a straight line to where they wanted to go: up the Mississippi, all the way to the Great Lakes, and over. 

"Yeah, yeah," I said, but he wasn't finished.

"Tobacco and indigo and cotton was the cargo ... they were the most profitable, in that order, probably because they only thought this special cotton produced in a small area of North Carolina was lucrative. Mainly they sold indigo and tobacco back to the British. 

"Meh. Mercantilism." But my mind was swimming. 

The last time I made this trip my mother and I got caught in a spring blizzard. The year was 1987 and I was visiting the school to which my transfer was a foregone conclusion. Of course, as I steered my parents’ brand new Accord into the fourth skid of the journey, I was having doubts.

It was a good trip, though, and one I remember fondly. My mother was charmed by all the things that went sideways: the white-out snow, a packed and peppy Peter’s Pub, a campus tour that featured a coed dorm where a flood of frat boys filed into the hall at just the moment our group passed wearing nothing but towels. 

A part of me thinks she was disappointed I went elsewhere. 

I suppose I was, too, when my son said the university was on his “list.”

We’d passed two or three locks before my husband started to explain how they work and how many they number.  

"See that over there? It looks like a couple of guard houses in the water? Those go down into the canal to keep the water high so boats can float on through. They can also aid in flood control, backing off some of the water.”

“What used to be commercial is now recreation.”

As the conversation started to get a little heated, traffic in front of us slowed down to a crawl. The husband took it as a sign to try his car’s autopilot feature. He readily admits he’s robot overlord curious, but only to a point. 

With his hands hovering at five and seven, the car inched forward on its own. An alarm dinged loudly whenever the steering wheel felt neglected. 

“I guess it doesn’t trust itself much either,” the boy sneers. 

“What is that,” he points at the map on the dashboard screen. “Is that … a poop emoji?”

Well, it’s pretty sh*tty.

When the traffic clears, my husband returns to analog steering and my son returns to DJing and lecturing on his understanding of Drake and Kentrick Lamar’s discography of diss tracks. It is a history lesson in its own right. 

Pretty soon we’ve made it to the finger lakes. 

"The fingers are pointing down, but they can seriously hold wine," quipps my husband. 

The boy is not amused.

"Seneca Falls is where women’s suffrage started," he retorts. "You know they had to get a man to rent out the hall - the Wesleyan Chapel -  where they held the convention because women weren’t allowed to.”

That’s when the conversation takes a left, careering into his own family’s feminist history. 

“Remember that time we went to Grandma’s house and we all thought she had gotten a Dodge Charger, but it was just a muscle-bound looking Prius? 

We pass the next hour reading roadsides aloud with snarky commentary.

“Oh look; the greatest exporter of American Freedom, Lockheed Martin!”

“Rome? 

“Liverpool… Can we not think up our own names?”

Maybe we should change the subject, our driver suggests.

"Don’t you think bucket lists are creepy?" his co-pilot obliges.

“No. It’s not like people do them on their deathbeds. It’s something you do when you're young enough to enjoy it.”

“Let’s ask Mom: Hey what’s on your bucket list?”

“Nothing. Bucket lists are creepy."

“Thank you!”

"I just enjoy spending time with you weirdos."