Summer’s here, which means that in order to both hang onto my house and not end up having to burn my kitchen chairs for fuel this winter, I’m cramming in as many summer jobs as I can. My favorite of these is the one in which I sell tickets to Monhegan and Squirrel Islands, because I work with wonderful, funny people, half of whom I taught. The other day, though, I made a discovery about one of these people; a girl I’ve known for five years, who can talk about nothing but sailing, and who spends most of her time trying to figure out ways to get on board any ship that comes within rowing distance of Quaint Coastal Village, casually admitted that she gets seasick. Not just queasy, but really, truly, damn-you-and-your -whale-Ahab, sick. To which I, queen of self-awareness, replied, “How can you love something that treats you so badly?”
I shouldn’t have said anything to Kim, because I really have no leg to stand on regarding this one. She loves her boats, and I love my bike. And my bike has been treating me pretty badly lately.
In the last week, I’ve had experienced more Unexpected Events than I’ve had in my entire riding career. It’s a comfort to my self-reliance to know that all of these Events have occurred well after my live-in bike mechanic hit the road. So I learn to do things on my own.
Unexpected Event Number One: I got lost. Not just, “Gee, I wonder if I should take Dairy Farm Quagmire Family Dynasty Cemetery Road, or Lake Too Small For Jet-Skis Though They’ll Never Stop Trying Road, to get home.” This lost had some definite indications that I was nowhere near Kansas. Glancing at a map in the morning, I found a good long loop that was going to take me out a main road, up to another, and drop me back on another. All clearly marked, maybe a little heavy on traffic, but with good shoulders for getting up some speed. Except as I trundled along the first main road, I began running out of landmarks. I began to think I’d missed my turnoff, and would eventually end up in Belfast, which is where this particular road leads. The primary issue here was that some trickster apparently decided to settle Belfast on top of a mountain. Lost is one thing; lost on a perpetual incline that makes you wonder if you’ll ever breathe again without sounding like an emphysema patient is another. It’s apparent that if anyone in Belfast has, say, some marbles that they suddenly need to get to my house, they can just set them on the ground, and I will eventually receive them through the grace of gravity.
But these are small troubles, easy to handle. It was my one day off a week; really, I had all day to wander around out there, or at least until my two apples ran out. But then, as the terrain continued upwards, the surroundings became more and more alarming. What might a tourist to the region expect to see on the road to Belfast? Well. First, there are big pickup trucks. I’m really fine with these. They’re all guys in their thirties with boat trailers, and while sometimes the trailers like to play little games in which they skip sideways in an attempt to befriend me after the truck’s long gone, I can deal with them. There are also many Saabs, each of which carries two kayaks. They never carry a single kayak; there are always two. Conveniently ignoring the fact that a couple years ago, I was one of these smug kayakers, I found their irritating whooshes past me good motivation for revisiting some of my old favorite curses. But then things changed. The trucks became smaller and older, and lost their trailers. They gained gun racks, and passengers who rode snuggled up next to the driver. I began to pass churches; not the nice friendly ones, but the kind of churches that have signs with changeable letters, whose messages declined from the grammatical cliffhanger “Casting your cares upon Him,” to the spiritual sledgehammer, “Your sin will find you out.” These churches had names like Road To Belfast Hellfire and Puppy Hating Meeting Hall. I began to think that I was no longer in a good place for a girl in bike shorts to be. I was grateful that I was not, in fact, a guy in bike shorts.
So I called my grandmother. I figured she’d have a map and could tell me roughly where I was. This decision, however, had a cost. My entire family is a little weirded out by my biking. On a bike, they figure, bad things can happen to you. You can, like, die. It’s probably safer to say inside all the time, is their general philosophy, or at least the philosophy hinted at by my grandmother over the years.
Anyway, I’d been afraid no one would answer. But luckily for me, the entire family was assembled in her kitchen. Which allowed my grandmother, after my discreet request for her map services, to bellow something like, “Mouse is incompetently lost!” and hand the phone to my uncle. He was heroic in getting me sorted out, but the ignominy of having to call my grandmother stayed with me, and still hasn’t died, thanks to the perpetual mocking of my friend Nick, to whom I may or may not speak again, given his tendency to keep bringing this up.
But that was that, I got home, and beat my longest distance, and was too tired to even really make myself dinner, so I was happy. And then two days later I got a flat tire. And had to call my grandmother.
Leaving my string of curses out of it for a minute, let’s assess the rest of the Flat Tire Day. After being delivered to my house, I raced through a shower, sped to the bike shop, and asked for a new tube and tire. I did not have time to have the kid at the shop put the tire on for me, because I was going to be late to work, which was still an hour’s drive from the bike shop. I managed the inn (which is another story for another time) with half my mind on how the heck I was going to change my bike tire all by myself. I got home, and at 9:30 at night, began the tire removal.
A note on changing bike tires: it can be hard. I’ve never done it before. Sam showed me once, but this was years ago, and even my friend Nick needed his friend’s dad to help him change his. Furthermore, this was the rear wheel, which meant that I had all sorts of issues with my derailleur, with which I’ve never had a really close relationship. In fact, until about four years ago, I never really knew what a derailleur was; I just knew it was back there somewhere. So yes, for grease-covered bike shop guys, this is no big. For me, it was… big.
I was done in twenty minutes.
I was covered in bike grease. And I really mean covered. I don’t know how I can have gotten bike grease on, like, my shoulder blade, but I did. The next day, a girl at the gas station said, “You’ve got something…” and I looked down to see grease I’d missed on my calf, and on my elbow, and on the back of my knee. It gets everywhere, and it’s not easy to make go away. Honestly, I’ve never looked so good. It was fantastic. I had some trouble with my quick release, which almost drove me to tears, but after becoming certain that I’d ruined my derailleur or somehow bent my rims, I eventually got it figured out.
And then, three days and three rides later, the tube went. And I had to call my mom.
This time I had time to bring in the whole tire. The guy at the bike shop said I’d put the thing together fine and something had gotten to the tube. He also said, as he was crouched over my tire, that this was a hard one to get on. He did not say this to make me feel good; he said it to make him feel good, as I did lap after lap around the shop waiting for him to lever it all back together. So I took it home, had even more trouble with my newest nemesis, Quick-Release, whose perfidy once again nearly made me scream, and I then sat in the kitchen eyeing my creation with apprehension. I knew now how Victor Frankenstein felt after piecing together his monster. Why did this seem like a good idea? What guarantee did I have that all the pieces would do all the things I wanted at the times I wanted them to do them? How did I know my bike wouldn’t, say, suddenly run amuck and strangle an innocent child with its brake cables? I didn’t know; I lived in fear.
Nevertheless, I had to set out. So I did. And for fifteen miles, everything was fine. Until my quick release fell off. Because I’d apparently loosened something too far. I don’t know how much experience you have with searching a gravelly shoulder for a tiny bolt, but my experience was certainly not all I could have hoped. I used the duct tape I’d used to attach my pump to my frame to secure the brake, and started home. The duct tape actually held up so well that I’d just decided to finish my ride the long way, when the rain started. This was fine; I can ride in rain. But then came the thunder. And the lightning. And the rain that tried to bore holes in my helmet and permanently blind me. I truly could not have been more wet if I’d jumped into a bathtub. And I was a little concerned about what kind of scorch marks an aluminum frame would leave on my lightning-struck body. So I went home. Again.
I’m still currently holding my brake on with duct tape. This decision conflicts wildly with the advice of the bike shop guy, but as he can’t fix my bike without keeping it for 48 hours, he doesn’t get a vote. Thing is, riding is a strange addiction. Riding promotes more riding. A long day does not lead to a day of rest; it leads to a longer day. Which leads to a longer day. Someday I will have to get this part fixed. But I hope this day will be a snowy one, in mistily distant months from now.
I think everything’s okay. I think things will hold together, and that there’s really no reason for me to become stranded. I’ve got a spare tube and a pump and a tire lever and my Allen keys. I’ve got my phone. I’ve got a grandmother.
But I’ve also got the knowledge that this thing I love can let me down. And I’ve got the awareness that my mechanic skills stop short and the tire-changing stage, and, in a roadside situation, may not even work then. I know that even duct tape may fail me, and that I may get stranded in a place where I’m not certain to emerge without a fixed backwoods stare on my face.
But the Tour de France is starting on Saturday, and there’s at least one guy in the peleton who hasn’t been doping. Statistically, there’s got to be one; ‘tis one thing to be tempted, another thing to fall, and I have faith that there’s at least one pair of legs on the Tour that still feels the old bike love in its pure state. And if you watch the footage, and watch them ride exactly the way I don’t, winging away on these bikes that are barely even there, you’ll get why a person rides. Go to www.bicycling.com and watch 1997 footage of Jan Ullrich chewing up mountains, or look at old photos of Eddie Merckx when he was young and perfect, and listen to the French announcers repeat his name with excitement that edges into frenzy. Watch Lance Armstrong attack on the Alpe d’Huez in 2001, and then watch him turn around and give a good long look to all the guys whose hearts he’s just broken.
It’s okay if bicycling treats us badly sometimes. Lightning and duct tape are nothing when compared to broken hips and collarbones, and while I may look haunted and rattled at the top of the Lake Too Small For Jet-Skis Hill, my haunted expression will need some work before it can match the expression of anyone who’s ever won the polka-dot jersey. So, as Freddie Mercury said, I want to ride my bicycle. In fact, my friend Nick just called and invited me for a ride. Keep an eye out for me. I’m the one in the lovely duct-tape-and-grease ensemble, grinding up hills slower than death, but having a pretty good time.
04 July 2008
10 June 2008
How to End Things
It’s the end of another year. Last Friday my seniors marched through the gym with their blue-tassled heads bobbing—ideally—in unison, and those of us who had chanted, “Left, right, no—LEFT! No, Bobo, your other left,” at them for the past week leaned back and let them file in one last time without further comment. We knew they’d forget that they get crammed up at the turn, and suddenly all the tall guys in the back of the line would realize that they were too close to each other, but they coped, and finally they walked out of the building for the last time. Or, really, what we only pretend is the last time. They filter back in, for basketball games, to get transcripts, for the banal miscellany of life that we want to pretend, for one day in June, does not make up most of our days.
My first years watching this procession, I was sad to see them go. I’d watch them walk through the gym one last time and think, I’m not going to be used to seeing these kids anymore. When we meet in the future, they will be polite and full of chipper comments about their English classes, where their professors will somehow, because they are, in fact, English teachers, remind the kids of me. Last year, despite having some students I truly hated to lose, I didn’t have that sense. Go on, I’ll see you, was my general feeling. Through the blue-colored graduation and the sea of white that’s the Grand March cotillion, I was detached; I did not have that panic of early years that maybe I forgot to tell them something. And this year, I feel a general sense of the rightness of things. I tried to teach them, and now it’s time for them to go.
Compared to my former glow, this seems callous. I have a Writing Club full of seniors whose work I’ve watched grow since they were freshmen, and it’s about to become a Writing Club full of no one. You could wallpaper Gatsby’s mansion with the love poems they’ve shot back and forth at each other over the years, and you could feed victims of at least one natural disaster with the pretzels and clementines we’ve scarfed down together. On our last day, after I gave them my farewell speech, one of them opened his laptop and started up his music. He played the theme to Dead Poets’ Society, and everyone stood up on their desks for me. That was a good moment. That beat graduation by a lot, because those were kids who were using their own time to do something with words, who were staying after school, standing on desks for me. After a minute, we all realized that in order for the moment to match its cinematic inspiration, I would have to leave the room and never return, so instead we just divided up the rest of the brownies and went home.
It’s moments like these that make me forget the dreariness of March, when everyone in my first period study hall shows up half an hour late, because they just don’t see the point of coming in, or of the week before April vacation when everyone’s so high on sunlight and the reintroduction of tank tops to the sartorial spectrum that they spend their days mainly just vibrating through classes.
Sometimes, though, it’s not just Writing Club that pulls through and makes me relatively glad I’m still a teacher. So in honor of my Writing Club and their ability to restore my faith in humanity, I’ve compiled a list of events from this year that will stay with me beyond the band’s last, off-key strains of “Pomp and Circumstance.”
1. When, after telling me for a week straight that I absolutely had to see his favorite movie, a senior boy got sick of my evasions and declared, loudly, in the hall, “Okay, Ms. Mouse. Today at lunch I am going home, and I am going to get you Knocked Up.”
2. When, assigned to memorize “All the world’s a stage,” one of my seniors simply could not recite it standing still, so we just started walking, and he told it to me as we paced the halls, as if I were listening to Shakespeare himself, one of his buddies walking along, hearing him compose the thing extemporaneously.
3. When I was prompter for the school poetry recitation competition, and I sat in the front row whispering up to a nervous freshman, “You sit on my heart as on a nest,” until the rest of the words returned.
4. When Writing Club gave their poetry reading on April Fool’s Day, and one of my seniors showed up late with a giant coil of rope which he, between poems, attached to a lighting fixture. To my hissed demands to know what the hell he was doing he gave no answer, and then proved himself to be an excellent April Fool’s Prankster by making his prank be no prank at all, besides raising my blood pressure to capacity.
5. When one of the football players in my Creative Writing class asked if he could choose to write a short story instead of a sestina, and then showed me the first thirty pages—single spaced!— of a novel, which I’m only the second person to have ever read.
6. When I gave up and started reading aloud to my least motivated class, and they were suddenly silent as I read them entire chapters of Tim O’Brien, and they then said my favorite thing to hear: the phrase that’s better than I love you, better even than You were right: they said, I actually like this book.
7. When one of the girls I took to England last year mentioned casually and without prompting, that the British Museum was one of her favorite places in the world.
8. When one of my seniors went to jail and came out not only having read the book I half-heartedly assigned him, but five other books too, and could not only talk to me about them, but wanted my opinion on his new tattoo.
9. When one of my seniors went to see Patrick Stuart in Macbeth and he returned to act out the whole thing for me, witches, apparitions, and all, me interrupting, both of us yelling lines at each other like crazy people.
10. When, lined up for Grand March Friday night, seeing them all for the last time as I joined the other senior advisors pinning on boutonnières and straightening ties, I heard something familiar, and looked over my shoulder to see the whole line of them launched up the hallway in a flotilla of white, as one senior, the one who always liked to get a reaction, turned to look at me and called, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” as he headed off down the hall, away from all of this, away from his crazy English teacher who keeps track of such things, who knows he’s going to forget all of this someday, and so will remember it for him.
My first years watching this procession, I was sad to see them go. I’d watch them walk through the gym one last time and think, I’m not going to be used to seeing these kids anymore. When we meet in the future, they will be polite and full of chipper comments about their English classes, where their professors will somehow, because they are, in fact, English teachers, remind the kids of me. Last year, despite having some students I truly hated to lose, I didn’t have that sense. Go on, I’ll see you, was my general feeling. Through the blue-colored graduation and the sea of white that’s the Grand March cotillion, I was detached; I did not have that panic of early years that maybe I forgot to tell them something. And this year, I feel a general sense of the rightness of things. I tried to teach them, and now it’s time for them to go.
Compared to my former glow, this seems callous. I have a Writing Club full of seniors whose work I’ve watched grow since they were freshmen, and it’s about to become a Writing Club full of no one. You could wallpaper Gatsby’s mansion with the love poems they’ve shot back and forth at each other over the years, and you could feed victims of at least one natural disaster with the pretzels and clementines we’ve scarfed down together. On our last day, after I gave them my farewell speech, one of them opened his laptop and started up his music. He played the theme to Dead Poets’ Society, and everyone stood up on their desks for me. That was a good moment. That beat graduation by a lot, because those were kids who were using their own time to do something with words, who were staying after school, standing on desks for me. After a minute, we all realized that in order for the moment to match its cinematic inspiration, I would have to leave the room and never return, so instead we just divided up the rest of the brownies and went home.
It’s moments like these that make me forget the dreariness of March, when everyone in my first period study hall shows up half an hour late, because they just don’t see the point of coming in, or of the week before April vacation when everyone’s so high on sunlight and the reintroduction of tank tops to the sartorial spectrum that they spend their days mainly just vibrating through classes.
Sometimes, though, it’s not just Writing Club that pulls through and makes me relatively glad I’m still a teacher. So in honor of my Writing Club and their ability to restore my faith in humanity, I’ve compiled a list of events from this year that will stay with me beyond the band’s last, off-key strains of “Pomp and Circumstance.”
1. When, after telling me for a week straight that I absolutely had to see his favorite movie, a senior boy got sick of my evasions and declared, loudly, in the hall, “Okay, Ms. Mouse. Today at lunch I am going home, and I am going to get you Knocked Up.”
2. When, assigned to memorize “All the world’s a stage,” one of my seniors simply could not recite it standing still, so we just started walking, and he told it to me as we paced the halls, as if I were listening to Shakespeare himself, one of his buddies walking along, hearing him compose the thing extemporaneously.
3. When I was prompter for the school poetry recitation competition, and I sat in the front row whispering up to a nervous freshman, “You sit on my heart as on a nest,” until the rest of the words returned.
4. When Writing Club gave their poetry reading on April Fool’s Day, and one of my seniors showed up late with a giant coil of rope which he, between poems, attached to a lighting fixture. To my hissed demands to know what the hell he was doing he gave no answer, and then proved himself to be an excellent April Fool’s Prankster by making his prank be no prank at all, besides raising my blood pressure to capacity.
5. When one of the football players in my Creative Writing class asked if he could choose to write a short story instead of a sestina, and then showed me the first thirty pages—single spaced!— of a novel, which I’m only the second person to have ever read.
6. When I gave up and started reading aloud to my least motivated class, and they were suddenly silent as I read them entire chapters of Tim O’Brien, and they then said my favorite thing to hear: the phrase that’s better than I love you, better even than You were right: they said, I actually like this book.
7. When one of the girls I took to England last year mentioned casually and without prompting, that the British Museum was one of her favorite places in the world.
8. When one of my seniors went to jail and came out not only having read the book I half-heartedly assigned him, but five other books too, and could not only talk to me about them, but wanted my opinion on his new tattoo.
9. When one of my seniors went to see Patrick Stuart in Macbeth and he returned to act out the whole thing for me, witches, apparitions, and all, me interrupting, both of us yelling lines at each other like crazy people.
10. When, lined up for Grand March Friday night, seeing them all for the last time as I joined the other senior advisors pinning on boutonnières and straightening ties, I heard something familiar, and looked over my shoulder to see the whole line of them launched up the hallway in a flotilla of white, as one senior, the one who always liked to get a reaction, turned to look at me and called, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” as he headed off down the hall, away from all of this, away from his crazy English teacher who keeps track of such things, who knows he’s going to forget all of this someday, and so will remember it for him.
19 May 2008
How To Ride Your Bicycle
It occurred to me this morning that a good bike ride is like a wedding. There are requirements that must be fulfilled in order for the thing to be a success. Instead of something old, n., b. and b., a real bike ride must possess its own assortment of traditions.
You must, firstly, have the chance to make an ass of yourself. This can involve a number of instances, the most exciting of which involves clipless pedals. For those of you who, like my mother, believe that clipless pedals mean that the rider must tie her feet into shoes that are permanently screwed to the bike, I can put your mind to rest on that one. A nice twist of the ankle is all it takes to remove the foot from its clipped-in position. However, there are occasions upon which the ankle does not have the time or inclination to twist. Sam once rode all the way into our garage before throwing himself onto the lawn mower, but with this exception accounted for, the clipless fall will usually only occur when there are bystanders. My friend Anne went over in Central Park, which, while famous for many things, does not note “isolated” on its resume. Last summer I nearly went over when stopping at an intersection in Dairy Farm Quagmire in front of a large tattooed man, whose day I made as I hopped desperately in a small circle, determined not to lose the skin on one leg by toppling into the dirt. My friend Eric has a better story, in which he not only went over while still clipped in, but rolled right onto his back like a turtle. I’m only sorry I wasn’t there to cheer him on.
But there are other ways of making an ass of yourself on a bike. My favorite of late is my decision, when stopped on a side street in Route One Morass, to give in to the extremely pressing need to snot rocket (a common need among cyclists, though one that I find gets much less press than it deserves), only to discover that I’d done so directly in front of a hair salon’s picture window. My reflection slowly dissolved into the understandably distressed face of a woman having her hair put into curlers, and I giggled for about five miles afterwards.
There is also the requirement, while we’re talking about interacting with others, of being out long enough to have a condescending interaction with an elderly character. I’m grateful for these people, who don’t seem to mind me sitting on the benches outside their shops, snarfing down my boiled eggs and swilling water. Someday I will work up a prefab list of thoughtful conversational topics, but for now, I’m still in a slightly stoned state when caught resting during a ride, and can only manage an idiotic grin and sound something like “Yeahahahhh,” when confronted with a “Good ride?” or other pleasantry. But this is a requirement of the ride; if you’re not out long enough to interact with other humans, you’re just out in the morass of your own mind, pedaling against your own thoughts. It’s so much more rewarding to be going about your business, and suddenly be interrupted, as I was last spring, by an octogenarian gardener who called to me, “Looking good! Keep it up!” And I ask you, if an 80 year old man can’t say “Looking good,” without raising eyebrows, who among us can? The serious, glowering-at-the-pavement kind of road ride may be good for those of us into self-flagellation, but I am of the opinion that the more cyclists interact with those around us, the more likely we are to be given a wider berth on dangerous roads. It’s important to be nice to people, if only to keep them from running you over.
Interpersonal interactions aside, there is always the weather to contend with. If we assume that a real ride lasts at least three hours, we also assume that at some point during the ride, we will be rained on. This will sometimes be a torrential affair, but will usually be just half-assed enough to make us spend the next ten miles debating the wisdom of whipping out the rain jacket. A smart rain can keep you arguing with yourself for the full loop, and will leave your shoes squishy and musical.
You must also ride, at some point, into a cruel, ball-breaking headwind from the north. This wind must be intent on ending you and your will to live. It must gust with dedication. Once you’ve had your balls, or ovaries, or whatever you most cherish, broken by the wind, you must also climb a ball-breaking hill as well. This hill should have no ostensible end. It should last for days; your thoughts, which so frequently go along their own contented way like Venetian gondoliers, should have the chance to flit from topic to topic like they’re attempting frenetic canal changes. One thought that will always come to light, no matter how fit you are, will be, This sucks. You might, at some point, reach a higher consciousness. You might, at some point, have a thought not voiceable by a 13 year old boy. You might, at some point, realize that you are climbing this hill, that you’re not even tired, really, more like just waiting until you get to the top, because you know you will. My aunt asked awhile ago, “Do you ever get off and walk?” and I remember being kind of shocked by the question. It’s not that I’m a riding snob; I’m still the slowest cyclist I know, and I still refuse to ride with my friend Nick, whose cycling persona is a frustrating combination of the Roadrunner and The Song That Doesn’t End. Whenever I insist that we compare our speeds, he tries to comfort me with the claim that beating my average by four miles an hour isn’t really that much. He’s nice enough to pretend that I’ll catch up in no time. The truth is that I’ve been riding all winter, getting up at 4:30 to grind away on the trainer in my living room, while his bike has spent the winter chained to his banister. The fact that he’s spent the winter sitting around watching Soylent Green while I’ve been pedaling my brains out, and that he can still smoke me, causes me no end of ire and tooth gnashing. But. Speeds aside, the fact is just this: if you bike, you don’t get off the bike. Even when it’s attached to your feet, and you’re on the ground.
At some point in a real ride, when your boiled eggs have come and gone, you will start remembering the leftover pizza in your fridge. At first this will be a pleasant memory, but as the ride continues and one last wave of showers drives into your face, you will begin to think of this leftover pizza with an almost indecent affection usually saved for members of your gender of choice. You begin to love that pizza. You have plans for you and that pizza that go beyond simple consumption; you have a future with your pizza. You will give it the best possible care. You will put it on a nice plate. You will wait the extra ten seconds for the microwave to reestablish the lithe and melty spirit of the cheese. You will treat that pizza like a small god. Men may come along and break your heart, but it doesn’t matter right now, because you have that pizza waiting at home for you, and by God, it’s gonna treat you right. And it never disappoints. As you slump in contented gluttony, you enter a Jim-Henson-like vision, in which you feel like calling up men from the past and having the pizza talk to them, giving them critiques on how to really treat a woman. Yes. Post-ride pizza really knows where it’s at.
The only thing that competes with the post-ride refueling might be the post-ride shower. A real post-ride shower is one of life’s most pure indulgences. Yes, there’s sex, there’s unhealthy but delicious food, but for pleasures that can’t possibly give you regrets, the post-ride shower has to take home the prize. You might just sit down on the floor of the shower and enjoy the general sense of being warmed by an outside being. All you have to do is remain motionless, and road grime and sweat are whisked away as your body, after a constant torrent of rain and the kind of wind only a dump truck intent on going in the opposite direction can create, is restored to room temperature. If we’re allowed to choose our own afterlives, this may be where you find me for a large percentage of the time, especially if Gerard Butler’s going to be busy elsewhere.
And speaking of the afterlife, a real ride involves at least one incident that causes you to recall your own mortality. This may be while breaking 40 on a curve while a Mac truck crumbles the pavement as it passes you. It may be while suddenly discovering that the shoulder is about to drop off and you’re seconds from an “involuntary dismount” into a pile of broken asphalt, or it may be when your presence causes a rottweiler to decide that it could use some exercise and possibly a snack. Or it may be when you’re halfway across the Route One Morass Bridge and a gust of wind comes from upriver in an attempt to knock you and your runny nose into the flow of traffic. Or it may be when you’re tearing down a hill, a good long one, and your eyes begin to tear up, and all you can do is keep a nice easy grip on your handlebars, and you start to feel yourself leave your body, because you’re going so fast, because no one has ever gone this fast, and there are no such things as brakes, because who would be crazy enough to stop this feeling, this blind, catch-me-if-you-can screaming down towards a river bottom, and you forget how to breathe but it doesn’t matter because the air’s just swimming through you, and you think, if I had to choose a way…. That’s the good part. That’s when gravity lets us have a good time, when it says Hey! I can be fun, too, and after that whole long, heart-crushing winter of pedaling into the dark, pedaling without going anywhere, without seeing anything but the confines of the same empty living room, you’re out in the world, ripping past lilacs and tulips and rain-soaked pavement and a world of other smells as they pass through you, and they have to pass through you, because you can’t even see them for the tears in your eyes.
You must, firstly, have the chance to make an ass of yourself. This can involve a number of instances, the most exciting of which involves clipless pedals. For those of you who, like my mother, believe that clipless pedals mean that the rider must tie her feet into shoes that are permanently screwed to the bike, I can put your mind to rest on that one. A nice twist of the ankle is all it takes to remove the foot from its clipped-in position. However, there are occasions upon which the ankle does not have the time or inclination to twist. Sam once rode all the way into our garage before throwing himself onto the lawn mower, but with this exception accounted for, the clipless fall will usually only occur when there are bystanders. My friend Anne went over in Central Park, which, while famous for many things, does not note “isolated” on its resume. Last summer I nearly went over when stopping at an intersection in Dairy Farm Quagmire in front of a large tattooed man, whose day I made as I hopped desperately in a small circle, determined not to lose the skin on one leg by toppling into the dirt. My friend Eric has a better story, in which he not only went over while still clipped in, but rolled right onto his back like a turtle. I’m only sorry I wasn’t there to cheer him on.
But there are other ways of making an ass of yourself on a bike. My favorite of late is my decision, when stopped on a side street in Route One Morass, to give in to the extremely pressing need to snot rocket (a common need among cyclists, though one that I find gets much less press than it deserves), only to discover that I’d done so directly in front of a hair salon’s picture window. My reflection slowly dissolved into the understandably distressed face of a woman having her hair put into curlers, and I giggled for about five miles afterwards.
There is also the requirement, while we’re talking about interacting with others, of being out long enough to have a condescending interaction with an elderly character. I’m grateful for these people, who don’t seem to mind me sitting on the benches outside their shops, snarfing down my boiled eggs and swilling water. Someday I will work up a prefab list of thoughtful conversational topics, but for now, I’m still in a slightly stoned state when caught resting during a ride, and can only manage an idiotic grin and sound something like “Yeahahahhh,” when confronted with a “Good ride?” or other pleasantry. But this is a requirement of the ride; if you’re not out long enough to interact with other humans, you’re just out in the morass of your own mind, pedaling against your own thoughts. It’s so much more rewarding to be going about your business, and suddenly be interrupted, as I was last spring, by an octogenarian gardener who called to me, “Looking good! Keep it up!” And I ask you, if an 80 year old man can’t say “Looking good,” without raising eyebrows, who among us can? The serious, glowering-at-the-pavement kind of road ride may be good for those of us into self-flagellation, but I am of the opinion that the more cyclists interact with those around us, the more likely we are to be given a wider berth on dangerous roads. It’s important to be nice to people, if only to keep them from running you over.
Interpersonal interactions aside, there is always the weather to contend with. If we assume that a real ride lasts at least three hours, we also assume that at some point during the ride, we will be rained on. This will sometimes be a torrential affair, but will usually be just half-assed enough to make us spend the next ten miles debating the wisdom of whipping out the rain jacket. A smart rain can keep you arguing with yourself for the full loop, and will leave your shoes squishy and musical.
You must also ride, at some point, into a cruel, ball-breaking headwind from the north. This wind must be intent on ending you and your will to live. It must gust with dedication. Once you’ve had your balls, or ovaries, or whatever you most cherish, broken by the wind, you must also climb a ball-breaking hill as well. This hill should have no ostensible end. It should last for days; your thoughts, which so frequently go along their own contented way like Venetian gondoliers, should have the chance to flit from topic to topic like they’re attempting frenetic canal changes. One thought that will always come to light, no matter how fit you are, will be, This sucks. You might, at some point, reach a higher consciousness. You might, at some point, have a thought not voiceable by a 13 year old boy. You might, at some point, realize that you are climbing this hill, that you’re not even tired, really, more like just waiting until you get to the top, because you know you will. My aunt asked awhile ago, “Do you ever get off and walk?” and I remember being kind of shocked by the question. It’s not that I’m a riding snob; I’m still the slowest cyclist I know, and I still refuse to ride with my friend Nick, whose cycling persona is a frustrating combination of the Roadrunner and The Song That Doesn’t End. Whenever I insist that we compare our speeds, he tries to comfort me with the claim that beating my average by four miles an hour isn’t really that much. He’s nice enough to pretend that I’ll catch up in no time. The truth is that I’ve been riding all winter, getting up at 4:30 to grind away on the trainer in my living room, while his bike has spent the winter chained to his banister. The fact that he’s spent the winter sitting around watching Soylent Green while I’ve been pedaling my brains out, and that he can still smoke me, causes me no end of ire and tooth gnashing. But. Speeds aside, the fact is just this: if you bike, you don’t get off the bike. Even when it’s attached to your feet, and you’re on the ground.
At some point in a real ride, when your boiled eggs have come and gone, you will start remembering the leftover pizza in your fridge. At first this will be a pleasant memory, but as the ride continues and one last wave of showers drives into your face, you will begin to think of this leftover pizza with an almost indecent affection usually saved for members of your gender of choice. You begin to love that pizza. You have plans for you and that pizza that go beyond simple consumption; you have a future with your pizza. You will give it the best possible care. You will put it on a nice plate. You will wait the extra ten seconds for the microwave to reestablish the lithe and melty spirit of the cheese. You will treat that pizza like a small god. Men may come along and break your heart, but it doesn’t matter right now, because you have that pizza waiting at home for you, and by God, it’s gonna treat you right. And it never disappoints. As you slump in contented gluttony, you enter a Jim-Henson-like vision, in which you feel like calling up men from the past and having the pizza talk to them, giving them critiques on how to really treat a woman. Yes. Post-ride pizza really knows where it’s at.
The only thing that competes with the post-ride refueling might be the post-ride shower. A real post-ride shower is one of life’s most pure indulgences. Yes, there’s sex, there’s unhealthy but delicious food, but for pleasures that can’t possibly give you regrets, the post-ride shower has to take home the prize. You might just sit down on the floor of the shower and enjoy the general sense of being warmed by an outside being. All you have to do is remain motionless, and road grime and sweat are whisked away as your body, after a constant torrent of rain and the kind of wind only a dump truck intent on going in the opposite direction can create, is restored to room temperature. If we’re allowed to choose our own afterlives, this may be where you find me for a large percentage of the time, especially if Gerard Butler’s going to be busy elsewhere.
And speaking of the afterlife, a real ride involves at least one incident that causes you to recall your own mortality. This may be while breaking 40 on a curve while a Mac truck crumbles the pavement as it passes you. It may be while suddenly discovering that the shoulder is about to drop off and you’re seconds from an “involuntary dismount” into a pile of broken asphalt, or it may be when your presence causes a rottweiler to decide that it could use some exercise and possibly a snack. Or it may be when you’re halfway across the Route One Morass Bridge and a gust of wind comes from upriver in an attempt to knock you and your runny nose into the flow of traffic. Or it may be when you’re tearing down a hill, a good long one, and your eyes begin to tear up, and all you can do is keep a nice easy grip on your handlebars, and you start to feel yourself leave your body, because you’re going so fast, because no one has ever gone this fast, and there are no such things as brakes, because who would be crazy enough to stop this feeling, this blind, catch-me-if-you-can screaming down towards a river bottom, and you forget how to breathe but it doesn’t matter because the air’s just swimming through you, and you think, if I had to choose a way…. That’s the good part. That’s when gravity lets us have a good time, when it says Hey! I can be fun, too, and after that whole long, heart-crushing winter of pedaling into the dark, pedaling without going anywhere, without seeing anything but the confines of the same empty living room, you’re out in the world, ripping past lilacs and tulips and rain-soaked pavement and a world of other smells as they pass through you, and they have to pass through you, because you can’t even see them for the tears in your eyes.
07 May 2008
How To Kill Daffy
I’m not sure how I got roped into adopting ducks. It probably all began because I mentioned my pond. This one-tenth of an acre, in the middle of my field, is a haven for wild ducks when the seasons change. In spring there’s always one day when the whole backyard seems brighter, and it’s because the ice has broken and the pond reflects the sky again. It has a muskrat, too; a scarcely visible rodent doing the backstroke up and down its borders. It’s a good pond.
At some point I mentioned it to my students. A few days later a senior girl named Gladys sidled up to me. “How would you like some ducks?” I wouldn’t. I didn’t. I had a small flock of chickens to care for; I didn’t need ducks. I had fishers and foxes to worry about, feed to buy, poop to shovel. I was full up. But Gladys was persistent. They were homeless ducks, abandoned by their meth-addict mother, fluffy, helpless. So I agreed. “Great,” Gladys said sunnily. “They’ll be here in about a month.”
Here’s what happened in that month: my husband moved out, for starters. My chickens were decapitated by a weasel. I refinanced my mortgage. Which required me to get a summer job of about seven hundred hours a week selling handcrafted jewelry to women with boob jobs and fat husbands, to whom they would always turn vaguely when the matter of the bill arose. So, yes, silly me. I forgot about the ducks.
I forgot about the ducks until Gladys called me to tell me they’d arrived. There was, of course, a hitch. “The orphaned ducks were already adopted. But I still wanted ducks, so I ordered some baby ducklings.”
This had not been the deal. My ducks were going to be adolescents, cynical and bitchy ducks who would roll their eyes at me, whom I could pop in the pond and watch fly away in the fall, which was mercifully only three months away. I was not equipped for ducklings.
“Can you pick up the ducklings tomorrow after work?” Sure. Absolutely.
First, however, I had another task. The minute Sam moved out, my friend Anne told me that I should start dating. “Just because I don’t want you to be disappointed with the selection when you start actually wanting to date.” Tito didn’t count. I tried to convince her otherwise; I was better around Tito: I didn’t need sleep, I didn’t need food. I lost five pounds and was so antsy that my biking speeds were the best they’d ever been. Tito was good for me.
“It is not good for you that he wants to keep sleeping with other women,” Anne said.
Well, yes. There was that. Grumble. Getting over Tito required a certain amount of languishing. But while I languished, Anne insisted that I date. So, oddly, with his gregarious knowledge of every person in the state, did Tito. The last time he left my house, before I’d ended things, he told me, “You should date this guy I know... Mike Shepherd.” The guy Tito knew was a guy everyone else knew, too, and Anne, after we’d cursed Tito good and proper, supported the Tito Proposal. The guidance secretary supported it. The curriculum coordinator supported it. I am a vegetarian, and Mike has hiked the Appalacian Trail. Using these statistics, everyone was convinced that Mike and I were made for each other.
Fine. Who am I to disappoint an entire town.
So I’d asked Mike to coffee, and we’d agreed on the night of the duckling drop.
It didn’t go well. There was, of course, the embarrassing fact that Mike had asked me out when I was still married, oblivious to the ring I kept waving in his face as if swatting blackflies; there was also the total lack of chemistry. It was like a conversation between a nun and a priest, only less sexy. There were silences you could have driven a Mac truck through.
This would have been bad enough had not my phone rung in the middle of the ordeal. My grandmother was alone for the week, my entire family having gone to the Grand Canyon, and I was hesitant to leave calls unanswered. I could not use the screen on the back of my phone to identify the caller, of course, because on a bike ride earlier in the summer, I’d stuck my phone in my bra—when you’re built like me, this is really the main purpose of a bra: carrying stuff—and sweated all over it, ruining the screen. Lovely, no? The mysterious caller was not, however, my grandmother. It was Gloria, a junior girl in whom I had spent the previous school year futilely trying to instill the idea—ironically, given the death of my phone— that one’s self-esteem should not be a result of the one’s breast size. Hell, if Gladys could get my number, if a gaggle of drunken former students could get my number, why not Gloria? “I saw you sitting on the porch of the coffee shop with Mike Shepherd,” Gloria chirped. “So I was wondering how your date went?” I ground my phone as hard into my ear as I could, praying that Mike could not hear her.
“Actually,” I murmured, “It’s still going on, Gloria. I’ll talk to you later.” I hung up, offered as urbane a smile as I could muster, and realized that coffee was clearly over. As we made our way up the sidewalk, Mike veered away across the street without a word, and that was the last I saw of him for months. Anne, the guidance secretary, the curriculum coordinator, and, of course, Tito, were wrong. But it didn’t matter, because I had ducklings to get.
Gladys, however, was out to dinner. And she didn’t have a car. Which explains why I was driving around Quaint Coastal Village at ten o’clock at night, with Gladys, wanting nothing more than to chuck my ducklings into my cardboard box and take them home. But first I had to meet Gladys’ mother. Gladys’ mother was extraordinarily pleasant about a stranger showing up to her house after dark, especially given her apparent surprise upon discovery of Gladys’ plan to acquire ducks, said discovery being their arrival at her home. I suppressed a scream at this news, and told her that I would wait outside. I was waiting because Gladys’ boyfriend had the duck food, and Gladys’ boyfriend needed to drive to Gladys’ house to bring me the duck food. I stood on their well-landscaped lawn in the dark for maybe fifteen minutes, then Marlon showed up and helpfully carried the fifty pounds of duck food to my trunk. I strapped in my cardboard box of four peeping ducklings, and we hit the road. I tried to say things to soothe their panicked musical notes, as the sound of my voice seemed to quiet them, but I couldn’t think of much for conversation. I recited them Portia’s speech from The Merchant of Venice, which they seemed to appreciate. Well, who wouldn’t?
My dogs were extremely interested in the ducklings, whom I put in the shed for the night. The shed was big, but all the openings were off the ground and covered by two-inch square fencing. It seemed fine.
It was not fine. In the morning, I was one duckling down. One of the suckers had apparently hopped up onto the ledge, squeezed through the fence, and promptly been eaten by something. I searched, but neither saw him nor heard his peeping. I then set up the remaining three in a plastic under-bed storage container with food, water, and a screened top, and left them to go to work.
We did this for days and days. I decided to name them Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, silently mourning fallen D’Artagnan, but the names didn’t do much good as the ducklings were identical, black and celery-colored, with a shock of fuzz and tiny serrated beaks. Despite my total lack of time for them, I enjoyed giving them fresh newspaper and dry food, watching them splash about and completely ruin the fresh newspaper and dry food, and holding all three at once in my hands. They were nice ducks.
Before I go any further, we have to clarify one thing. What do ducks do?
Well, they quack. They poo everywhere. They… grow feathers.
They also swim. Ducks swim, okay? Mike Shepherd, whom I ran into months later—later enough for the horror of coffee to be an amusing memory—confirmed this, telling me that he’d read that ducks can swim from something like a week old. Ducks swim.
So my ducklings were getting bigger. Their dish of water was too small. So I upgraded them to a medium-sized Tupperware. I gave them a little ramp up the side, a couple of bricks to wade out onto, and filled the new pool a few inches. “Have fun,” I told them as I left that morning.
When I came home, I knew right away that something was wrong. The silence was unbearable; there was no cheery peeping, no splashing sounds. All three were floating, three dead ducks, in a couple inches of water.
After the chickens, this seemed a little much.
I took care of the tiny corpses, and spent the rest of the summer avoiding Gladys. I couldn’t even comfort myself that I’d given them a good home. Granted, it was an upgrade from the mailing crate they arrived in at the post office, but they’d never even gotten to see the pond. I was haunted by these ducks; everywhere went, I heard their ghostly peeping, little Mallard Jacob Marleys, rattling their chains whenever I walked through town. A week later, I discovered that another girl in town had adopted ducklings, and was carrying them around in her purse. So the peeping was not, in fact, ghostly. It was difficult to be perturbed by a Vera Bradley bag, but still, I felt terrible. But I also felt slightly annoyed. Ducks swim.
Perhaps I was living a perverse version of The Ugly Duckling, in which my ducks were actually baby ostriches, or iguanas, or possums, or some heretofore unknown species made of newspaper, or something else that implodes when moistened. All I know is, I’m done with fowl. Nothing could induce me to provide a home for any feathered creature; to paraphrase Benedick in Much Ado, I was not born under an avian planet. My pond welcomes ducks of the self-sufficient variety, and I am happy to welcome the neighborhood heron, who is tall enough to keep his head above water. Otherwise, until I can learn to keep inanimate objects like my phone from drowning, anything feathered is on its own.
At some point I mentioned it to my students. A few days later a senior girl named Gladys sidled up to me. “How would you like some ducks?” I wouldn’t. I didn’t. I had a small flock of chickens to care for; I didn’t need ducks. I had fishers and foxes to worry about, feed to buy, poop to shovel. I was full up. But Gladys was persistent. They were homeless ducks, abandoned by their meth-addict mother, fluffy, helpless. So I agreed. “Great,” Gladys said sunnily. “They’ll be here in about a month.”
Here’s what happened in that month: my husband moved out, for starters. My chickens were decapitated by a weasel. I refinanced my mortgage. Which required me to get a summer job of about seven hundred hours a week selling handcrafted jewelry to women with boob jobs and fat husbands, to whom they would always turn vaguely when the matter of the bill arose. So, yes, silly me. I forgot about the ducks.
I forgot about the ducks until Gladys called me to tell me they’d arrived. There was, of course, a hitch. “The orphaned ducks were already adopted. But I still wanted ducks, so I ordered some baby ducklings.”
This had not been the deal. My ducks were going to be adolescents, cynical and bitchy ducks who would roll their eyes at me, whom I could pop in the pond and watch fly away in the fall, which was mercifully only three months away. I was not equipped for ducklings.
“Can you pick up the ducklings tomorrow after work?” Sure. Absolutely.
First, however, I had another task. The minute Sam moved out, my friend Anne told me that I should start dating. “Just because I don’t want you to be disappointed with the selection when you start actually wanting to date.” Tito didn’t count. I tried to convince her otherwise; I was better around Tito: I didn’t need sleep, I didn’t need food. I lost five pounds and was so antsy that my biking speeds were the best they’d ever been. Tito was good for me.
“It is not good for you that he wants to keep sleeping with other women,” Anne said.
Well, yes. There was that. Grumble. Getting over Tito required a certain amount of languishing. But while I languished, Anne insisted that I date. So, oddly, with his gregarious knowledge of every person in the state, did Tito. The last time he left my house, before I’d ended things, he told me, “You should date this guy I know... Mike Shepherd.” The guy Tito knew was a guy everyone else knew, too, and Anne, after we’d cursed Tito good and proper, supported the Tito Proposal. The guidance secretary supported it. The curriculum coordinator supported it. I am a vegetarian, and Mike has hiked the Appalacian Trail. Using these statistics, everyone was convinced that Mike and I were made for each other.
Fine. Who am I to disappoint an entire town.
So I’d asked Mike to coffee, and we’d agreed on the night of the duckling drop.
It didn’t go well. There was, of course, the embarrassing fact that Mike had asked me out when I was still married, oblivious to the ring I kept waving in his face as if swatting blackflies; there was also the total lack of chemistry. It was like a conversation between a nun and a priest, only less sexy. There were silences you could have driven a Mac truck through.
This would have been bad enough had not my phone rung in the middle of the ordeal. My grandmother was alone for the week, my entire family having gone to the Grand Canyon, and I was hesitant to leave calls unanswered. I could not use the screen on the back of my phone to identify the caller, of course, because on a bike ride earlier in the summer, I’d stuck my phone in my bra—when you’re built like me, this is really the main purpose of a bra: carrying stuff—and sweated all over it, ruining the screen. Lovely, no? The mysterious caller was not, however, my grandmother. It was Gloria, a junior girl in whom I had spent the previous school year futilely trying to instill the idea—ironically, given the death of my phone— that one’s self-esteem should not be a result of the one’s breast size. Hell, if Gladys could get my number, if a gaggle of drunken former students could get my number, why not Gloria? “I saw you sitting on the porch of the coffee shop with Mike Shepherd,” Gloria chirped. “So I was wondering how your date went?” I ground my phone as hard into my ear as I could, praying that Mike could not hear her.
“Actually,” I murmured, “It’s still going on, Gloria. I’ll talk to you later.” I hung up, offered as urbane a smile as I could muster, and realized that coffee was clearly over. As we made our way up the sidewalk, Mike veered away across the street without a word, and that was the last I saw of him for months. Anne, the guidance secretary, the curriculum coordinator, and, of course, Tito, were wrong. But it didn’t matter, because I had ducklings to get.
Gladys, however, was out to dinner. And she didn’t have a car. Which explains why I was driving around Quaint Coastal Village at ten o’clock at night, with Gladys, wanting nothing more than to chuck my ducklings into my cardboard box and take them home. But first I had to meet Gladys’ mother. Gladys’ mother was extraordinarily pleasant about a stranger showing up to her house after dark, especially given her apparent surprise upon discovery of Gladys’ plan to acquire ducks, said discovery being their arrival at her home. I suppressed a scream at this news, and told her that I would wait outside. I was waiting because Gladys’ boyfriend had the duck food, and Gladys’ boyfriend needed to drive to Gladys’ house to bring me the duck food. I stood on their well-landscaped lawn in the dark for maybe fifteen minutes, then Marlon showed up and helpfully carried the fifty pounds of duck food to my trunk. I strapped in my cardboard box of four peeping ducklings, and we hit the road. I tried to say things to soothe their panicked musical notes, as the sound of my voice seemed to quiet them, but I couldn’t think of much for conversation. I recited them Portia’s speech from The Merchant of Venice, which they seemed to appreciate. Well, who wouldn’t?
My dogs were extremely interested in the ducklings, whom I put in the shed for the night. The shed was big, but all the openings were off the ground and covered by two-inch square fencing. It seemed fine.
It was not fine. In the morning, I was one duckling down. One of the suckers had apparently hopped up onto the ledge, squeezed through the fence, and promptly been eaten by something. I searched, but neither saw him nor heard his peeping. I then set up the remaining three in a plastic under-bed storage container with food, water, and a screened top, and left them to go to work.
We did this for days and days. I decided to name them Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, silently mourning fallen D’Artagnan, but the names didn’t do much good as the ducklings were identical, black and celery-colored, with a shock of fuzz and tiny serrated beaks. Despite my total lack of time for them, I enjoyed giving them fresh newspaper and dry food, watching them splash about and completely ruin the fresh newspaper and dry food, and holding all three at once in my hands. They were nice ducks.
Before I go any further, we have to clarify one thing. What do ducks do?
Well, they quack. They poo everywhere. They… grow feathers.
They also swim. Ducks swim, okay? Mike Shepherd, whom I ran into months later—later enough for the horror of coffee to be an amusing memory—confirmed this, telling me that he’d read that ducks can swim from something like a week old. Ducks swim.
So my ducklings were getting bigger. Their dish of water was too small. So I upgraded them to a medium-sized Tupperware. I gave them a little ramp up the side, a couple of bricks to wade out onto, and filled the new pool a few inches. “Have fun,” I told them as I left that morning.
When I came home, I knew right away that something was wrong. The silence was unbearable; there was no cheery peeping, no splashing sounds. All three were floating, three dead ducks, in a couple inches of water.
After the chickens, this seemed a little much.
I took care of the tiny corpses, and spent the rest of the summer avoiding Gladys. I couldn’t even comfort myself that I’d given them a good home. Granted, it was an upgrade from the mailing crate they arrived in at the post office, but they’d never even gotten to see the pond. I was haunted by these ducks; everywhere went, I heard their ghostly peeping, little Mallard Jacob Marleys, rattling their chains whenever I walked through town. A week later, I discovered that another girl in town had adopted ducklings, and was carrying them around in her purse. So the peeping was not, in fact, ghostly. It was difficult to be perturbed by a Vera Bradley bag, but still, I felt terrible. But I also felt slightly annoyed. Ducks swim.
Perhaps I was living a perverse version of The Ugly Duckling, in which my ducks were actually baby ostriches, or iguanas, or possums, or some heretofore unknown species made of newspaper, or something else that implodes when moistened. All I know is, I’m done with fowl. Nothing could induce me to provide a home for any feathered creature; to paraphrase Benedick in Much Ado, I was not born under an avian planet. My pond welcomes ducks of the self-sufficient variety, and I am happy to welcome the neighborhood heron, who is tall enough to keep his head above water. Otherwise, until I can learn to keep inanimate objects like my phone from drowning, anything feathered is on its own.
21 April 2008
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….
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….
10 April 2008
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.
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.
02 April 2008
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.
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.
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