How to Fight Mephitis

You may not have noticed this, but it got dark really early this fall. I mean, one day things were fine; the sun rose in the east and set behind the ridge at perfectly rational times, and then – bam—terminal darkness. This made it difficult to walk the dogs after work. Even more difficulties were raised by the onset of hunting season. Usually this is fine; my neighbor Bob, who lets me walk the dogs on his immense property, is pretty good about keeping hunters off his land, mainly so they will avoid shooting his cows. But this year, Bob’s son Mark decided to impart the joys of hunting to his offspring. He has three children, ages ten, eleven, and twelve. And now they have guns. I got up early one Saturday to get a jump on the little hunters, and was halfway up the skitter trail when I saw them, a line of Elmer Fudds, trudging across the cow pasture. I turned the dogs around and headed home, grumbling. This was when I decided to start walking the dogs after sunset; that is, after it’s legal for ten-year-olds to be toting around guns.

At first, this was nice. Crisp fall evenings, a misty moon, a few stars, the dogs and me. It was pleasant. The dogs snuffled around ahead of me, and I leaned back and looked at the stars in their friendly little groups, clustered together in chatty constellations like freshmen around their lockers in the morning. There was Pegasus, and Orion, and Ursa Major, and eventually, the smaller and probably invented constellations that became my friends: the Little Pyramid, Laura Ingalls Wilder Flying a Kite, and the Fish Jumping Out Of The Tenor Saxophone. The fish’s name, I decided, was Fritz.

Fritz, Laura, and I enjoyed each others’ company immensely. Walking in the woods at night, alone, as a female, does of course present challenges. Most of these challenges lie within the imagination: is that a mad ax-man behind that big rock? Are those coyotes howling out of joy of being canine and alive, or because they think I’d make a nice snack? Walking in the dark does not pose many problems that walking in daylight cannot match, its main claim to fame being the inability to see where one is going. I counteracted this problem with an enormous police-brutality-sized Maglite that not only illuminated my way, but offered me the option of clubbing anything that decided to step out from behind a tree. With such protection, I immediately dismissed the possibility of dangers out there in the dark. This was, I found, a major mistake. Because I’d forgotten my two biggest childhood fears.

When I was about eight, my parents would drag me off cross-country skiing in the woods near our home. I didn’t mind the skiing, but I was convinced that major dangers lurked in the woods. I did not fear bears, or wolves, or mountain lions. I feared skunks, and I feared porcupines.

Skunks, I was sure, laid in wait in the woods with their nearsighted little faces buried in the snow simply in order to become startled enough by our presence to spray us good and proper. Porcupines did essentially the same thing, but their plans were to shoot quills at us, like riflemen, once we came within range. My parents disputed my fears time and again, and they seemed to be right. We never saw either creature.

Fears, I find, like it when you forget about them. They like it when you’re wandering around in the dark, gazing up at your friends Laura and Orion and Peggy, and suddenly OH MY GOD MAKE IT STOP you’re in the worst discomfort imaginable. It’s not a smell. It’s more than that. It is despair, ground entirely throughout your being like a marinade.

When you pass a dead skunk roadside, your nose warns you. Your nose says, burned rubber. Smoke. Oh, a skunk. And then your car whisks you onward and you go back to singing along to “David Duchovny, Why Won’t You Love Me,” on your radio. When you walk directly into a skunk’s spray, your nose tells you, Death. Garlic. Plague. Your nose says, you should probably run, but there’s not a lot of point, baby. And so you run.

It is, of course, too late. A skunk doesn’t unload on two dogs bearing down on it and miss much. This explains why I was on my front lawn at 9:00 on a school night, standing under the light on the front steps, shampooing my dogs in a futile manner as my hands became numb under the hose, knowing that all I was doing was adding “wet dog” to the bouquet of scent emanating from them. I washed all my clothes, my hair, my hands, obsessively. But I could still smell it.

The striped skunk’s Latin name is mephitis mephitis, which essentially means “stank stank.” (Mephitis is also the name of a Roman goddess; she’s the personification of the gases that rise from swamps. Imagine being the goddess who showed up late on Divine Titles Day and got that role. “Okay, here I am. Wait. Venus gets to control sex, and I’m… gas? Oh, man...”) The word “skunk” itself is from a corruption of an Abenaki term meaning “one who squirts,” which I find to be slightly misleading. The Abenaki apparently never felt the need to describe exactly what Mr. Segonku is squirting, or where he’s squirting it from, perhaps imagining a hearty laugh to be had on foreigners: “He squirts Indian beads, just like a gumball machine. You’ve just got to go up to him and yell real loud. By the way, thanks for the smallpox.”

Abenaki names aside, the rest of the world seems to agree on the unpleasant aroma, which some refer to as a “musk,” and which I feel is like calling the shooting of Archduke Ferdinand “a trifle vexing.” The chemical composition of mephitis mephitis’ spray is, according to Humboldt State University, of a complex nature involving seven major components, around half of which are responsible for the most, well, mephitic, smell. The key to de-skunking, then, is to combat these thiols by changing them into compounds that have less odor. The problem lies in the fact that while these volatile compounds can be battled and changed with something like hydrogen, the less offensive—but still smelly—thioacetate derivatives of these thiols are actually strengthened when combined with water. This, of course, explains the fact that a skunked dog will remain a skunked dog every time it rains for the next three months.

The woman at the vet told me to make up a solution of hydrogen peroxide and dish soap. I doused the dogs, and for about ten minutes, they smelled beautiful. Not only was the skunk gone, the wet dog smell was replaced by a general aroma of clean. I rejoiced. Hooray for hydrogen; the thiols were at bay. But then, predictably, it wore off. And Wet Dog and Skunk, my two new companions, returned like a couple of joyful ferrets, romping about the kitchen, rubbing up against me and asking if I’d missed them.

The smell of skunk became so much a part of my life that I stopped differentiating between skunk and other smells. The odor of my green tea as I drove to work made me flinch; how had Skunk gotten in the car? When kids came to ask me questions in my classroom, I’d interrupt them to say, “Do you smell something?” with an urgency most people save for situations slightly more pressing than the due date of the most recently assigned sonnet.

Wet Dog and Skunk, however, ended up taking a back seat pretty quickly. They were replaced by Phineas, our grumpy neighborhood porcupine.

Here’s what happens when a dog sticks its head into the backside of a porcupine. A lot of quills come out. And they’re not all long and easy to see, like some Mohawk necklace. They’re little and black and hard to get hold of. And they don’t just go into the nose. They go up the nose. They go into the lips. They go on the inside of the lips. They go into the tongue. They go into the gums. They go into the roof of the mouth.

Once the quills are in, though, they don’t just stay put. The barbs on a porcupine quill are fashioned to draw the quill further into the attacker’s flesh, so that every muscle’s motion is a further invitation to jab a few millimeters closer. You can eventually die from this, if you really want to. And even after you die, the quills can continue to work their way in, though it seems to me that by this point they’re wasting their time.

Here’s what else. The dogs have no idea that this has happened. Here’s their take: they see a funny looking rock. It starts to move. They move in for a closer look, and suddenly, a tail shoots out. And while they’re busy yelling, “Hey! Come back! I just want to talk to you!” their crazy owner starts yelling at them. They get dragged home and then, for absolutely no good reason, they are subjected to torture. For doing nothing. That’s my main complaint about porcupines. They have serious design flaws. Because dogs don’t learn. The pain comes later, and is totally disassociated with the actual animal. The actual animal is Phineas, the short and portly chap who sits under my apples trees and eats windfalls with both hands. He makes a sound like an outboard motor if you get too close, but he never stops munching on his apple. This is not a creature you would associate with pain. This is a creature who looks like he should be wearing a waistcoat and pocket watch. The pain is associated with, well, me.

And here’s another thing. Guess how much fun it is to remove porcupine quills from a dog’s nose by yourself. Not much, that’s how much fun. The golden retriever was not a problem; she was monumentally unhappy, but she has a militant sense of rank; she knows that I’m alpha, and if I want to rip things out of her nose, well, that’s my perverse prerogative. The process involved some heart-wrenching whining, and she was upset too, but the whole thing was over fairly quickly.

The lab, however, was a different story. First. They tell you that it’s easier to remove quills if you cut off the tips beforehand. This is only true if you’ve numbed the dog’s entire face. Because otherwise, you’re just messing with a sore spot twice rather than once. So I gave up on that idea fairly quickly. My lab does not have such a great sense of who’s in charge, which means that I was wrestling with an 85 pound dog on my kitchen floor for, well, a while. I came out ahead in the first round, sitting on her back with my legs wrapped around her shoulders and one hand pressing her chin into my knee. I have students who take Jiu-Jitsu, and I’m fairly certain that they would have been proud.

This worked for the outer portion. But then there were the quills under the lips. There were the quills on the gums. And there was the quill at the back of her throat.

For those of you who may someday need to single-handedly remove a porcupine quill from the back of a dog’s throat when the dog is nearly your size and already fairly displeased with you:

Don’t try sweet-talking the dog, because she stopped trusting you the first time you tried, as she sees it, to rip out her tongue. Just tackle her. Once you’ve established who gets to be on top (you want this to be you), grab your pliers. Don’t drop them in the scuffle, because then you’ll just have to crawl across the floor for them, which will cause you to loosen the grip your knees have just purchased around the dog’s neck. You will also need an oven mitt. Wrap your top leg around the dog’s body and use your other leg to kneel on her jaw. Hold the dog’s jaw open with the hand that holds your pliers, and use your teeth to pull on the oven mitt. Stick the mitted hand into the dog’s mouth to force the jaws open wide enough for you to see the inch-long Goddamn-motherloving-useless-piece-of-crap-why-does- God-hate-me-so-much quill suspended from the back of your dog’s mouth. Open the pliers just enough to grasp the quill. Tell your dog, in the most soothing tones you can muster, to stop the histrionics, which will involve a long string of curses and attempts to kill you with a baleful stare. Reach in. Grasp the quill. Yank.

Now yank again. And again. Because a quill covered in a gallon of ropy dog spit will not come out on the first try. Or the second, or the twelfth. But just keep trying. You’ll get it eventually. And your dog will let you keep trying, because it’s not as if having someone try to haul out your uvula is a bad thing. Right?

I did finally get the quill, and the dog did forgive me. The smell is gone from everything, and I’ve finally stopped stepping on random quills that remained on the kitchen floor. Life is good. It’s only two months until the days start getting shorter again. Next time I will be prepared. If anyone wants to help me, we can work a deal. I’ve got this great supply of Indian beads I’ll trade you….

How To Be Matchless

At Irving a couple weeks ago, I glanced over at the adjacent used car dealership to find an attractive man perusing the merchandise. Sighting an attractive man near my age in Quaint Coastal Village is kind of like seeing a timber wolf up in the county; you hear about these things happening, but don’t really expect to come across one yourself. My thought process, as I pumped half my paycheck into my gas tank, went as follows: Good looking, got all his hair. No obvious wedding ring. Oh. Oh, he’s looking at the F-250. Oh, he’s opening the door. Does he know the gas mileage those things get? A guy who would buy an environmental hatchet job like that in this day and age? Probably a Republican. Oh, and what’s he drinking? Coffee? Coffee leads to coffee breath. Yeah, and what’s he doing in Quaint Coastal Village, anyway? Waiting for the bars to open? Well. That was a close one.

Too picky? Perhaps. And knowing myself as I do, I should have suspected from the start that despite the optimistic advice I received from a number of sources, I am probably the last person who should attempt the process of humiliation that is online dating. So it’s no tragedy that my trial membership is about to run out at Match.com, a site I joined in a pout one night. I was pouting because the man who broke my heart, who from this point forth will be called Tito, texted me to tell me that he wasn’t actually going to drop by to visit and make amends, after all. Fine, I thought. Actually, fine is what I thought after I thought a lot of other things, but eventually I mopped myself off and plunked down my credit card number. I thought, I’ll show him.

I did not show him.

My first problem might have been my refusal to post a photo. While I may have stooped to the level of online dating (online cruel judgment of others is more accurate, but we’ll get to that), I have not been reduced to the place where I’m willing to sling photographic proof of such depths around the internet. So yes, first truth: without a photo, no man is going to latch on. I get sniffy about this until I realize that I am the same way. Clearly, the unphotographed men on the site cannot possibly share my desire for discretion. All of them are obviously hiding major physical defects, like third degree burns, or wart colonies, or unseemly tan lines. So I can’t really blame anyone for not breaking down my electronic door.

But this isn’t about my shortcomings; it’s about the shortcomings of others. After receiving periodic emails that alert me to “my matches,” I have come to reassess the way I am viewed—the way others see my dating potential. This summer, a former student told me that she wanted to introduce me to a guy she knows. Despite my obvious reluctance, she persisted. “He’s tall,” she said. Well, okay. “And he really likes John Deere and going to the lobster boat races and he rides a street bike and he works construction,” she finished in one breath.

Um.

This is a young woman to whom I taught Shakespeare. I taught her about Beowulf, about Transcendentalism, and how to write a sestina. I made her memorize “To be or not to be,” for crying out loud. I introduced her to the best way to make a cup of tea, and to my favorite movies, which are German, with subtitles.

Call me a snob, but I’m fairly certain that Mr. Crotch Rocket and I would not have much in common. And as someone with neither third-degree burns nor even a single wart, much less a conflagration of them, I feel that I might be able to aim higher on the dating totem pole than someone who enjoys watching boats go really fast. Go get 'em, Scuffy.

I don’t know why I’d expect a computerized dating service to have any more insight into my dating preferences than a real live human. My friend’s sister, who met her husband on this exact site, told me, “Do it! Just keep your expectations low.” Then she repeated herself. “Looooow.” I got it. Low.

Apparently my expectations were not low enough. Perhaps in more densely populated areas, this whole scene is slightly more vibrant. In Maine, however, the categories of men can be shaken down as follows:

--Men who think it’s charming to post those one-handed self-portraits— sometimes, if they’re really creative, taken at a 45 degree angle— so that the primary view one gets is of their nostrils and goatees. They all have goatees. In my imaginary meeting of these assembled men, the dialogue runs thusly: “Hey, we all have goatees! We all don’t have dates. Wait a minute…”

--Men who can’t spell. Your and you’re are not the same word, and never have been. Neither are who’s and whose, its and it’s, or our and are. Embarrassed is not spelled “imparassed,” though you get points for creativity. Capitalization may be going out of style, but with standards going down the toilet everywhere, the accurate use of an apostrophe may end up being the key to my heart.

--Men who post photos of themselves without shirts. Men who post photos of themselves without pants. Men who post photos of themselves with children, presumably to display their potential as a future mate (“Yes, he may have a prison tattoo, but that child clinging to his back tells a different story. Sign me up!”) Men who claim to be looking for “that special someone,” or who claim to love spoiling women. I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the sound of my own gagging.

--Men who claim to love hauling a tent to the middle of nowhere and roughing it. Come on now. If everyone who claimed to love camping actually loved camping, the Plum Creek issue at Moosehead Lake would never have arisen, simply because those nutty developers wouldn’t have been able to afford the bulldozers needed to shift all those goateed men out of the way. It’s a purely academic debate anyway, because I can’t stand camping. I’ll spend all day outdoors without complaint, but I like a bed and shower waiting at the end of the day. And in the incipient stages of a relationship, the last thing I want to contemplate is what a relative stranger would look like waking up after a night spent al fresco. I’m fairly certain that I wouldn’t be that stoked about cuddling up with Jake Gyllenhaal after a night in the forest, so a guy in the dire straits of online dating is certainly not going to light my fire, pardon the pun.

--Men who post photos of their trucks, boats, crotch rockets, or all of the above. Is this the fluttering of the tailfeathers? Are you showing me all that can be mine if I simply wade through your questionable prose? Is it not enough to tell me you love your truck? Must you also present visual proof of this romance?

--Men whose lists of interests includes “dragons.” Okay, that was one guy. But still. It was one guy who winked at me, twice, as if he possessed some sort of cyber-tic.

A wink, for those of you who actually have companionship on Friday nights, is a phenomenon in which a person can send you something that says, “He winked at you!” I still fail to see the purpose of this. My response is always a sullen, “What?” Which means I don’t respond. Which means I don’t have a great attitude about this game. But that was clear already. When you receive a wink, Match.com suggests that you “send an intriguing email!” in response. Which makes me laugh, because at the beginning of the school year, I had a senior boy whose use of the phrase “that’s so gay” got on my nerves until I actually lost my temper with him. He and I made a deal that in the future, in a nod to the idea that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy, he would call those things he did not understand “intriguing.” His vocabulary has improved, but the word “intriguing” is forever ruined for me. So while an “intriguing” email may double my chances for finding “that special someone,” I’m holding off. Male or female, my potential online dating partners will soon be a distant memory.

Thing is, I think “dating” is too hefty a term for me. I need to be outsmarted when it comes to romance; the men who succumb to Match.com’s invitation to describe their interests, best features (this one’s a drop-down menu, which, because it did not offer “collarbones” as a choice, I left blank), and perfect match, are, only by fault of their just being there, too overt for my tastes. This is why Tito was so successful; he was just always around, here at a friend’s Christmas party, there at a summer fireworks show. Sometimes we’d meet by chance in a parking lot, and we’d argue about the merits of teaching Shakespeare to high school kids, or whether it was really possible for my car to get 40 miles to the gallon (not only possible but true), and then without warning, I was in love with him-- a hard, screeming meemie kind of love-- and the rest is a very sad story for another time. Point is, all this cyber-preening becomes meaningless. These men are not humans to me; they’re simply fodder for my judgment. And though the shirtless guys are asking for ridicule, the others are probably just as tired as I am of eating pizza for one. I wish them luck. I, however, plan to continue to walk in a straight line from point A to point B, and assume that someday there will be someone on the other side of the pizza. It’s bound to happen. Just not inside the cab of an F-250.

How (Not) To Talk To Strangers

The other day as I was lamenting the dearth of dateable men in Quaint Coastal Village and its neighbors, Slightly Less Quaint Coastal Village, Route One Morass, and Dairy Farm Quagmire, I made a seemingly harmless comment. My exact words were, “I know it’s not like single men are just going to show up at my front door.”

Silly me.

A week later, as I was sitting at home during Snow Day 47 of the school year, there was a very quiet knock on my door. I was in the kitchen, not wearing my red fleece pajamas, though I was stuffing my face, hamster-like, with homemade bread. (I make very good bread. I defy you to try some without inhaling it immoderately.) Standing in my front yard was a man in snowshoes. He was sporting a beard— a big, brown, Ned Kelly style beard.

Right away, I have to get something off my chest. I hate beards. Everyone has their quirk, and mine is a complete intolerance for hirsute men. I have actually been known, unfairly and childishly, to make a sound very close to “Tchah,” when confronted with a bearded man. Beards are messy, uncomfortable in close quarters, imply questionable intentions, and offer too many opportunities to hang onto souvenirs of past meals and sneezes for far longer than necessary. My students are currently putting together a performance of Fiddler on the Roof, and every male cast member worth his testosterone is growing a beard for the part. It makes me nuts. Though in all other ways unlike Sweeney Todd, I find myself wanting to chase them with razors.

The Beard asked, “Are you Ms. Mouse?” Which, as my friend Nick pointed out to me later, is the point at which people usually pull out a gun. But since I’m not up to date on my television-based reality, I simply confirmed, though bemusedly.

The snowshoer’s name is Bernard. A couple weeks back, I attended a play directed by a friend. Apparently Bernard also attended this play. Apparently Bernard found something compelling in the way I sat there in the audience, watching the play along with everyone else. Apparently Bernard then asked around about me, discovered the location of my house, and then decided to snowshoe through the woods in order to find me.

This is the part at which I blame myself. At this point in the conversation, anyone with any wherewithal would have said, Excuse me? They would have said, Do you have any references? Could you take off your mittens so I can run a fingerprint check? I failed to say any of this. I was cold, standing there on my steps, barring the way into my kitchen. So the only way to end the conversation seemed to be to say, “Okay. Well, here’s my number.”

Yes. I deserve what I get.

In my feeble defense, handing out my number is not quite the rash move it might seem. This summer, my phone number landed in the wrong hands, and I found myself awake more than once to wave at two a.m. as it passed, listening to former students whose persistence and affection for Jell-O shots made for interesting—and difficult to end— discourse. It was certainly an unprecedented way to lose sleep. So the further distribution of my phone number hardly seemed a high price to pay in order to go back inside to my loaf of bread. I mean, it had raisins.

But the number, of course, led, to an offer to go snowshoeing. And a woman who cannot bring herself to hang up on drunken teenagers is certainly not a woman who can turn down a polite invite to go snowshoeing. When you’re off into the woods with a strange man, though, it’s good to have a backup plan, and I spent some time trying to figure out how casually I could pull off carrying a machete, until I decided that it would be hard to convince Bernard that I just wanted to cut a little wheat, maybe some rye, while we were out and about. In the end, I decided I’d be safe on the property of my neighbor Bob, whom I have seen use not only a machete, but a chain saw and, on one occasion, a backhoe, which could be easily converted into a weapon, or at least as a tool to bury the macheted or chain sawed corpse.

My first hint that things would not go well was when I asked Bernard to name a time. This request seemed to flabbergast him, as if time were something to be considered only theoretically, like the apocalypse, or a reunion tour of the Jackson Five. My insistence was for naught, though, because he showed up an hour late. But we set off, squeaking and crunching our way down my field, the dogs whinnying with excitement ahead of us.

It’s a good thing the dogs made some noise, because Bernard certainly seemed disinclined to converse. I forced myself through a rousing game of Twenty Questions, making heroic conversational leaps to keep a dialogue going (“Oh, a pinecone! That reminds me of that story on the news about Taiwan!”), but after that, gave up. There was nothing that appeared to fire him up, make him reciprocate, or lead us into a new topic. During this game I learned the following:

He did not attend college.
Well, that’s okay. Despite what I tell my students, college isn’t for everyone.

He used to paint houses.
Self-employment shows some initiative. That’s hard work, painting houses all day.

He is currently unemployed.
Hey, if you can afford it, why not?

Before that, he worked in Arizona.
So he’s traveled a little; bet he’s got some interesting stories.

Where he lost two fingers in mysterious accident.
…

He now spends all of his time writing poems and playing guitar.
Creative is good.

And the banjo.
Multi-talented. Wait. What does he play the banjo with? He’s missing entire limbs. Little ones, but still.

He now lives in a former carpenter’s workshop.
Great! He knows how to renovate.

Which does not have plumbing.
Ah. And that explains the smell.

I’m really not squeamish. But it is undeniable that the absence of plumbing did not come as a tremendous surprise. And like anyone who lacks a full grasp of scientific truths, I cling tenaciously to the little I do know, and what I do know is: people smell good to us for a reason. Smell is primal and atavistic and essential, and if you’re standing there delicately trying to aim your nostrils in another direction, you should probably move on to the next crazy snowshoer to show up at your door.

So we parted ways, I took a deep breath of fresh air, and that was that. The long silences born of a mutual disinterest had done their work. So I thought.

I was leaving for Mexico the next week, and told him I might be available when I got back, in same the tone you say that you might think about putting in a pool once the kids are off at college. But then came Snow Day 48, and a call from Bernard at 9 a.m. “I heard on the radio that you have a snow day,” he said. “Want to go snowshoeing?”

Well, actually, no.

Then came the call the day before I left for Mexico. “I’m about to leave town,” I said, mentally translating my words into Spanish in last-minute preparation. The phrase book I’d bought taught me, optimistically, how to say both “Which hotel is yours?” and “Let’s use a condom,” but, in a sunny prediction of a good time for all south of the border, did not offer suggestions for “Bugger off.” Which was unfortunate, because I was making no progress in English.

“Okay,” he said. “Want to do something tonight?”

This was my last chance, I saw later, to say, Dude. Back off. Play hard to get. It was my chance to say no to someone, to be direct. It was my chance to say, however belatedly, Screw you and your Jell-O shots. I want to sleep. But I failed. I made some excuse about packing, feeling guilty for actually having plans of my own. Maybe when I get back, I said. Smile, smile, smile. I will call you when I get back. And I intended to. I intended to call and say, I find you creepy. I just needed a week to work up to it.

Advice I received on this topic was completely split down gender lines. My friend Anne, whose equilibrium is bolstered by enough years of therapy that her advice is the soundest I can get, said, “You’ve got to tell him you’re only interested in being friends. And you have to make it its own conversation so he really understands.” Sitting under a tin roof somewhere outside Taxco, drinking out of a coconut with my feet up on a chair to avoid a casual flock of guinea hens, this sounded easy as paella. Such advice was seconded by my sister, mother, and my friend Kate. Be kind, be direct. Fight a lifetime’s worth of instruction on Being a Good Puritan Girl Who Puts Up With Everything, and tell him the truth.

The men I knew took a steeply different line. As my coworker Hank put it, “You should get a gun.” Or, as my friend Nick suggested, “You should get a gun.” Or, as a guy who overheard me relating this story to a friend said, “You should get a gun. Hey, you want to buy my .22?”

I demurred.

Hank said, “He shows up at your door, you can call me, but I’m 45 minutes away, and that’s a long time to pretend your door’s jammed.”

“If I had a gun, I’d just end up shooting something,” I told Hank.

He blinked. “That’s the point. That’s why people get guns, to shoot things.”

“I don’t need a gun,” I argued. “I have more appendages than this guy. And he’s an unemployed poet. In a fight, I’m bound to win.” I then made a very funny joke about how Bernard can’t even be that great an unemployed poet, because you need all ten fingers to write in iambic pentameter, and with two missing fingers, he can only write in tetrameter. Hank teaches accounting, though, so this flew right over his head. Mathematicians.

This was all before Mexico. I was all about the kind, let’s-be-friends routine. But when I got back, I had a message waiting for me. And the next day, before I could do anything about it, Bernard called me twice more. I came to realize that the let’s-be-friends speech would be a lie. I didn’t want to be friends. I wanted… well, I was starting to want a gun.

It didn’t come to that. In the end, I called Bernard, said something wandering and airheaded about not starting new relationships, and that was that. I’ve not heard from him since. I was direct— after some failed tries, anyway— and I’m now back to snowshoeing alone, my dogs floundering through the snow beside me, wondering when the heck spring will get here. There are major benefits to snowshoeing alone. Counting higher than eight. Deep breaths without compunction. And as much raisin bread as I want, all to my greedy, Bearded Bernard the Banjo Bard banishing self.