Shipboard Fire, September 1949

Image via Wikipedia

For National Fire Prevention Week:

My grandfather was a little older than the "Greatest Generation." He was an engineer, and so worked steadily and hard through the Depression. During World War II, likewise, he was involved in the industrial might of the War Effort, and worked long hours. In the meantime, my grandmother--a notable clubwoman and mother--ran the household.

By 1949, they decided the children were old enough to stay with  family for a week. They booked passage on a cruise, drove to Cleveland, Ohio, and boarded "The Queen of the Lakes" on September 15, 1949.  The ship, built in 1916, was a gorgeous luxury packet, with wood wainscoting and all the amenities. It could hold as many as 600 passengers. For this cruise, 524 had signed up.

The S.S. Noronic would usually cruise Lake Ontario, spend a couple of nights in Toronto's harbor (as shown above). The ship was grand, with a band and 171 crew--fabulous! From there, people would enjoy the night life and (package theatre or nightclub deal, for instance) included with the trip. My grandparents went out drinking and dancing, returning quite well-lit I'm sure from the evening of September 17th. Unlike many of the shipboard passengers, they did not bring guests back with them. But a great many passengers did.

Despite the late hour and possible Scotch-and-water overload, my grandfather, for some reason, could not sleep. He heard a clunk, the word 'fire' and got up to investigate.

One Bad Move, or Two, or Three
Apparently another passenger beat him to the concern. Don Church, a passenger on D deck, noted a smell of smoke about 2:30 a.m., when almost everyone was sleeping off their martinis. He followed it upstairs and then located a steward.

My grandmother said they could never figure out what caused the fire. They thought it was oily rags, piled sloppily together from polishing the fancy woodwork, that had warmed themselves to ignition: a kind of spontaneous combustion. The oxygen was all that was required to make a disaster. I sometimes wonder if a cigarette or cigar had a part in it.

Don Church, the steward, and another crewman attempted to fight the fire. According to the Walkerville Times:

The first person [Church] encountered was a bellboy named Earnest O’Neil, and they rushed to the linen closet. They both heard the crackling sound of fire from behind the door. Finding that he did not have the right keys for the closest, O’Neil ran to the steward’s office on D Deck to get the correct keys.

He returned with a fire extinguisher, and prepped himself for fighting the fire, and opened the door to the closet. Two others appeared to aid in the fight, including a passenger across from the closet.

Freed of the linen closet and with a fresh source of oxygen, the flames backdrafted down the hall in both directions, gaining fuel from the walls. Still with the hope of containing the fire, one of the courageous three went to get a fire hose, but as they opened the valve, only a trickle of water came out.

Church ran to D deck and got his family out. That might have been who my grandfather heard, slamming out of their cabin and running to evacuate. He stopped to notify:

[Church] soon encountered the wheelman on duty, Windsor’s Jim Donaldson, and explained the severity of the situation. Running up to A Deck, Donaldson advised Capt. Taylor and the First Mate, Gerry Wood. The Captain had returned from an evening ashore only 20 minutes earlier.

Having determined that the fire was serious, Donaldson ran to the wheelhouse to throw the ship’s whistle for the fire signal, but tragically, the whistle seized. Instead of sounding one long blast, three short blasts and another long blast – the signal for fire on board – the horn emitted a bone-chilling shriek that pierced the air without a pause.

At 2:38 a.m., eight minutes after the first passenger realized there was a problem, the ship was already 50% on fire. The harbor security called the fire service. Those responders could see the glow before they had even reached Pier 9. They called for reinforcements at 2:41.

Picture Montage: The Walkerville Times.

My grandfather pulled my grandmother to the deck, which was already starting to crowd. At this point I should tell you that none of the decks had direct access to the dock. Therefore people were trying to get out by jumping overboard. Once my folks determined the lay of the ship, they also were going to jump. The problem was, of course, all the other people who were each trying to see what they could do.  And that problem was complicated in that a great many of the crew (all but sixteen, including the Captain) had been given the night off.

Evacuation: Not for the Squeamish
So, the fire-fighting equipment did not work. There was no exit, no organization, a huge fire out of nowhere in one of the worst possible sites for a fire: a ship. The fire fighters could see people silhouetted on B deck and surrounded by fire--no way out. They tried making a ladder bridge for those who could evacuate, a heroic effort in itself:

It was clear to all that the most daunting task was how to get people off the ship. Setting up fire department Aerial Number 5, an 85-foot long wooden ladder built in 1931, at the base of Noronic’s bow, the fire fighters aligned it with B Deck at an angle of 26 degrees. It barely made contact when a woman immediately jumped upon it, as did many other passengers.Almost in frenzy, the fast-clambering passengers and the natural movement of the ship made it very difficult for the fire fighters to keep the ladder aligned on the tip of the bow. Panicked, a female passenger stumbled on the ladder and the following passengers fell into her, their combined weight focused on a small point on the ladder. With a terrifying crack, the ladder snapped in two and sent the frightened passengers into the cold water.

The Fire Department tried again:

At this time, Aerial Number 1 arrived, but could not get to the ship because of parked cars. After clearing these obstructions, Aerial Number 1 neared the ship to a distance of 90 feet and extended its 100-foot ladder to C Deck. Having been made aware of the failure of ladder 5, they braced ladder 1 with hand-ladders underneath it at 15-foot intervals.

They were also lifting people out of the water who could cling to shorter ladders--backbreaking work.

Valiant efforts were made to extinguish the flames by fire fighters, but the heat was so intense that the water vaporized before it reached the hull of the ship! The metal structure was visibly white from the intense heat. By 2:46 a.m., the fireboat tied up to the Noronic’s bow and began to pour water in via two smaller hoses and the turret nozzle.

The stories my grandmother told about the evacuation were horrible. One man thought he could get out by sliding down a wire cable. My grandmother watched as he slid down, losing all his fingers before he dropped into the water. Another man, an Olympic grade swimmer, deserted his wife and children on board ship in a neat dive. He was never seen again. Lake Ontario is deep, wide, with temperature differentials that cause turbulence. My grandmother always said that he drowned, but there was only one drowning death reported: perhaps that was the one.

Somewhere in all this my grandmother suffered severe burns to her hands. Then my grandparents got their opportunity to get off the ship. They jumped together and started swimming. Unfortunately, my grandmother got stuck in a rain of suitcases over the side. Those that were evacuating planned to do it with their luggage. My grandfather lost her as she was buffeted, and taken under, by several direct hits. Plus, with her hands injured, and less fit overall, she was not doing so well.

The Fog of Disaster
My grandfather was swimming to the dock, turning around and seeing a dark-haired woman behind him in a blue gown. It was the wrong dark-haired woman in the wrong gown. He managed to save himself, and the strange woman. My grandmother was picked up by a skiff on the third gulp down after the third or fifth suitcase. They were re-united in the hospital. My grandmother wore bandages and later had plastic surgery to repair the defacement of her hands. They were always fragile after that--not for everything, but some minor impairment.

Lessons
What use is this family legend? Well, it gave my family examples of human selfishness and selflessness, life and death. We learned disaster potentially hits anyone. Beyond that, we did not think about evacuation any better than to know not to take our suitcase on the way out.

Image via Wikipedia

In truth though, this story could have taught us many lessons:
1. To know our terrain well enough to be able to leave it.
2. To believe in safety measures and safety standards and to ask about them.
3. Pack light or do not pack at all. Possessions are a hindrance in an emergency.
4. Be a leader, even if it is only to be the first to follow instructions.
5. Keep a clear head.
6. Don't park in a fire lane.

These are pictures from before, in 1930, during, and immediately after the fire. Nobody knows how many passengers died, somewhere between 104 to 139 of the 524 on board the ship, plus an unknown number of guests--as many as 300 total. The inquiry afterward was long and pointed. No crew member died. This was thought to be significant, but I don't think it is as important as the rags, the wood polish, the possible cigar, the time-off schedule, or the fire hoses and whistle out of commission. In other words, the best way to forestall disaster is to prepare for it.

Living Proof

Well, you might remember I had an appointment to go through the twisted four years of estate planning, taxes, and medical emergencies--the paper relics that I couldn't quite deal with. Two and a half hours, four boxes, one grocery bag later . . . . Dan and I had made four and 3/4 boxes for the trash, plus half of a trash can.

Before that, I had the closet mostly worked out. I cleaned the small closet, too. I cleared on my desk and my chairs, other parts of the house as necessary to reorganize how this was going to work.

I need two boxes, one small, one medium, both for memorabilia. That will be fun. I'm basically done.

I found more letters. Dan found them, actually. He said, "Did you donate books to the library?"
I had to think about it. I said, "Yeah, the Resident's lounge, I took them my husband's professional books. They didn't have any."

There were a couple of other thank-you letters.

He said, "You did all the right things. You don't need these any more." He threw the letters away.

Two hours later, I got nervous and went down to the trash room to find them. I couldn't. I am just going to have to trust that I will remember. I did the right things. And when I had the proof, I couldn't find it anyway. Had I found it, it would have meant nothing to anyone except me.

The meaning has to be inside. Living proof.

Paper Pushing, Part 2

There are so many things left:

Twelve file drawers of potential: mine. Mostly alphabetical. Haven't gone through those yet. Much.
Old dreams. Old plans. Many of them are still dreams. Still plans, even.

Four file boxes of income tax for eight years.
The years of the twist: I've sorted through those, and removed the emotional content. I have the letters, the journals, the drawings.

But emotional content still lives over those years, and every paper associated with them. Every page was mis-filed by my suddenly organizationally-challenged husband, held by him or searched for like an anchor in this life, somehow necessary. Medical reports describing him, plans funding him, records of his expenditures or the car he couldn't drive or the truck I drove him to treatment in, the truck he screamed at me in that his life was over if I took away the only hope he had. Papers on the house where he died.

You would think the screaming was a low point. Oh, no. It was a good moment. It was the moment that I knew his life before had not been in vain. That even though there was no right thing any more, that once:

There was a right thing to do, and we had done it.

I can truthfully say that this one screaming moment, in my truck, was the best moment, the least controversial moment, in four years. Because it settled my doubts. But it was sad. He wanted to continue in his profession, and he could not. He was angry because he would not see it and that was what I had to see. It was his better nature at war against the life he had left.

His anger allowed him to continue in hope. It left the rest of us with little to say.


So, just to rein all this inexplicable emotion in, I've hired a consultant.
Tomorrow I take four boxes of papers that apply to four years downstairs to meet with a wonderful, friendly, compassionate, but ultimately business-like person I know. We are going through the papers that should not be emotional. We will decide what can be pitched. What should be shredded. What should be kept for business purposes.

So this will cost me. Yet it is costing me now, to hang onto six copies of an insurance policy or a stray airline ticket that might be tax-deductible.  It doesn't cost money to hang onto papers. It costs me a future. A place to put the tools of my ambition. Or to feature my potential.

Will my life be about the past or the future?
Will I run a museum of inessential data or a home?
Will I be able to separate the emotional from the factual?

I can't do it alone. I have to have help. That  is what the checkbook is for. Money, for the good life. Not trips to the Riviera. But a functional life.

By discarding the non-essential, I preserve the essential. For two lives, really.

Before he was sick, he was part of every growth and potential I ever had. By discarding the non-essential, I make room for the essential.

Sorry if this seems so sad. I'm sad, but not so much. I think it was far worse before.
There's air in my apartment now. A lack of dust. Loved things show up.

Paper Pushing

Who knew one space, 72" wide, and 88" long, could occupy so much freaking time? Well, I'm almost done.

But it's not really the space. It's what it contains. I can't even tell you how many metaphors I have found in cleaning this damned closet. Well, it's not damned any more. And in the meantime, I found incredible things.

Some incredibly painful. Some incredibly boring. Some really nice.

But I think the big one this week is a letter I never sent to my father-in-law. It was too heartbreaking.
He was going to relieve me for part of a week while I went to go visit my sister, get a break. Caregiving. Because we couldn't trust my husband not to go under a surgeon's knife, or to be seizure-free, or to buy $10,0000.00 worth of home repair, or, you name it.

In the letter, I wrote that my husband said to me, very happily, as if it was a visit to a carnival.
"Yeah, if you leave me, you won't know if I'll be dead before you get back!!!!"

It's beyond explanation. Did he want me to feel guilty for leaving? Did he want me to be happy? Was he assessing risk? Was he playing? Scared? Did he want to die? Every last one of those. Every last one, and other things he meant that I can't know.

The world is so big and so full of infinite possibilities. Those include the possibilities for infinite crap.

What I have learned from my closet: my life was sick and twisted and I took care and paid attention. I got so much unusual information. It changed me forever. It's no wonder that I have been heartsick and twisted up.

So maybe I forgive myself a little. Maybe I understand more. Maybe I save that letter, next to all the love letters and cards my husband wrote me, when he was not sick. I have a bunch of them. They are all true.

What's In the Closet

I remember when I moved to this tiny condominium from a fairly large duplex. Before that, I lived in a three-bedroom house with only two people to spread out and do all kinds of projects. I cut down considerably for the duplex, and then I came to Hot Winds, the town where all blather blows. Rents and mortgages are sky-high and floor plans are low in square feet.

When I moved, it was the first time I hired a professional mover. If I am smart, I will never do that again. It cost the moon, and they wrecked one file cabinet, my sewing machine, and double-dinged my sofa. Plus I slept on the floor for two weeks because they warehoused my load instead of bringing it on. In my own truck I had a cat, a box of pans and toiletries, another box of cleaning supplies, a yard chair, and a pair of binoculars that somehow got left out of a box. When I unpacked, I felt like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, with a soupcon of the Joads added in.

But before that, I had to cut down.

I did it by math. I was moving from 1500 to 500 square feet, so every category had to be cut by two-thirds. That was 1. large furniture, 2. occasional furniture, 3. memorabilia, 4. financial records, 5. books, and 6. kitchen/bath. And art supplies, sewing supplies, scrapbooks, etc etc.

I never did succeed in cutting down the books two-thirds. At that time I had about 3,000 volumes.  But I spent a long majority of time on this. RiverTown had eight used bookstores. I would cull down and take boxes in for trade. One day I had twelve cartons to trade. The first store took five of them and in exchange I took three books. What a deal!

I took the rejected seven boxes to the next store, and then on and on. The eight-times-rejected last two boxes went to Goodwill. In the meantime, I had garnered a huge box of New Books. The only one I remember for sure getting from that trade-a-thon is An Encyclopedia of Georgian England, which I still have. It's a great book. And I got it down to about 1500 volumes, which I thought was pretty good.

Financial records can only be pared down so much. But I threw out, sold, gave away, and traded around a bunch of items. One person at my bookstore had become an amateur carpenter. I gave away the table he had made me as a gift. But I was afraid he'd find it elsewhere. I drove out of town and left it at a Goodwill in another region of Louisiana.

I find that much of what I own still has out-sized identifiers on it. I watched a friend of mine go through a hell of grief--both her parents died, and her sister committed suicide. She was drowning in old possessions to either sell or keep or real estate that needed serious rehab. My book trade-a-thon was a small piece of what she was trying to do. When my husband died, I determined I wouldn't get stuck as she did. Plus I had to sell a bunch of it in order to keep going for awhile.

And yet.

Most of what is in the closet is not clothes. It is old memories. I threw out so many pictures when I moved, but I still had eight small albums of them (still do). I have files on everything I've ever studied, including the best artist postcard collection you've ever seen. I have tin boxes from a great-grandmother I never met and china cats from a grandmother that passed away--my other grandmother's bread knife and my grandfather's bow tie, gloves and pitchers and silver trays I never used even in the day and who knows what all?

All of these things could be valued and valuable to my life. But at what point do they hinder the growth of new life? Part of the reason I have been taking so long is that it is hard to figure out what would be a representative collection.  Because I do not want to be buried along with the dead people in my life. I want to move forward. But I don't want to forget them either.

It's not that I love the possessions, or couldn't live without them. I love the people, and I love the history. But too much personal history is not conducive to personal movement. It does me no good to save Christmas ornaments if there's no place to put a tree, for instance. So, either the ornaments go, or something else leaves that makes room for a tree, and a Christmas party--a joyous celebration in the middle of winter. Determining between those two is easy. But then there are follow-up choices that have to be made. Each of them requires some painstaking thinking.

I got rid of the dinged-up couch months ago and have yet to find a replacement. The two dress forms are going to go--place for a Christmas tree if I want one. The photo albums are staying and so is my grandfather's bow tie. The silver Elegant-Ware is out the door someday soon.

For some people, these will look like the wrong choices. For me, they will be the right ones.

The Fall and Rise of the Swords-Woman

I.

Once upon a time, when I was looking for direction in life, I took a battery of psych and vocational tests. Just off the internet--I did not want to pay whatever the Psychological Examiners charged.

I told a co-worker, a clear introvert, that I was taking a test on whether I was an extrovert or an introvert. The co-worker smiled a tiny smile and walked out of the office.

I called her back. "I just realized, if I was an introvert I would never have told you that." The introvert could not stop giggling. Darn it.

Another thing about this test? I am a crusader, an Extrovert Ntuitive Feeling Perceiver. It's the NF that makes the crusade. We fight for the underdog, but we are not ourselves underdogs. Or at least, I think it makes us lonely but active people. When we are active, the lonely doesn't matter as much.

And perhaps inexplicable on the MBTI test: I frequently believe that true morality lives at some distance from certitude. Maybe that's the Perceiver initial--as opposed, in the test, to the Judgment. I'm just about half and half there.

II.

Those days of looking for direction were right after my husband died, and I was living hand to mouth before the probate was completed. Good thing I had a job: all hell needed to be cleaned up. After that, I had a future that had to be addressed. All in all, I'd had several scary years, and they didn't stop being scary after that.

As Hagakure says, you must be inward and outward. I also think you have to be in the right culture, one that will cut breaks for merit, and I wasn't. Everybody just needed more, or, they had dropped off early during the course of the fight (his family (except my 87 year old F-I-L, a  perpetual exclusion from this generality) and our friends), or had kept their distance from the start (my family, his colleagues).

But I knew how to look for help. I just thought I wouldn't need it this time, or I didn't have time for it. Help would eventually show up, or I would get enough sleep or through the briars eventually. Bit by bit I walked into the shadows and didn't realize how infinitesimally less light there was at each step.

Self-help and high standards were not good enough. Neither was flexibility or acceptance.

III.

My husband had recently undergone surgery for brain cancer. He had been scheduled for a post-op MRI. Afterwards, we were eating at a lunch counter.

"Today's my fortieth birthday," I reminded him. That was the first anyone had mentioned it. We were in a crisis--you know we were.

He raised an eyebrow and gave me a supercilious look. It perfectly conveyed: So What.
He had a point. But I didn't like it. It hurt my feelings. And it was not a good sign of my husband's ability to win allies for his recovery.

I have celebrated my birthday alone for over ten years.

IV.

When my husband died, it had been two long years of never knowing what would happen next, and two years of not knowing what was wrong before that. I never slept more than two hours at a time and I never cried except when I woke up from a nightmare. I had a full time job and that kept me sane. I worked mostly afternoon shifts, the three to midnight, so that I could take care of details during the day, go to doctor appointments, work the finances, keep the house, manage my husband's aftercare, listen to his frustrations, persuade, nag, trick, or prepare him into doing whatever had to be done, and give him room to choose, as an adult can, whenever it wasn't life and death. My days off were planned around chemotherapy or emergency repair of bad decisions during the week. I did heroic work, and I did it alone. I know this and I knew it at the time.

He hated me for it. I don't exaggerate this, but it wasn't an adult hate. I don't blame him for that emotion. He made sure his family was dissatisfied with me, although they were free to hate at leisure. (He did or said something to his mother that ensured she would never visit again. I don't know what it was-she wouldn't say. She just took a cab to the airport.)

They were wrong to buy into it, but I don't blame him for the trashing. You have to understand that he wasn't himself, and whatever straw he could grasp to make it, I wanted him to have it. I didn't want to be hated, of course not. But it was not a fixable condition. I was what he could no longer be: the responsible party, the lucky one. The closest, most visible reminder of what he had lost. And the safest target.

A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation.  --Bertrand Russell.

This quote leaves me  nowhere to go and no way to feel that I loved him enough. It's true for my husband's side though. I understand what Russell means. It also doesn't cover everything, because patient resignation is too static a description for a caregiver. And my husband couldn't really tell if he was liked or not. 

He retained all his intelligence, but he could never use it wisely after that. He could remember being fully competent, but he couldn't add new competencies or use the ones he had struggled to master. Now you think about how horrible that would be.

He couldn't access the mood in a room to understand distress, tension, lies, truths, scams, or signs of new developments. He retained small glimpses of sweetness, like a boy's sweetness, but the considerate man was gone.  His personality did not survive. His brain was compromised.

And I think my brain paid. I think it lost some physical function from over-use of neurotransmitters and lack of sleep. I lost psychological wellness. I think I used my inside up. And even a 65% extrovert can't function without an interior, so I dropped the sword, too, eventually. I was incapacitating and couldn't see the wounds well enough to note the severity.

V.

There are people out there today, with spouses or children who went to Iraq, Afghanistan, the corner grocery store, and suffered trauma: an IED, an AK round, an auto or Humvee accident that induced brain injury. Those wives and mothers, husbands and fathers now have a spouse or child who is but mostly is not the same person. I know what that's like. If I could tell them anything, I'd say: if you aren't well, if you don't renew your inner self, you can't fix a damn thing for your son or husband in the long run.

"That which does not kill me, makes me stronger."--Freidrich Nietzsche.

Frankly, I think Nietzsche is full of crap on this one. It depends on how much rest you get between killer agonies.

For people caring for those with brain trauma, I know it's impossible to predict when that renewal might somehow be made available. Or affordable. You have to go after it, and you have to pay when it's not free. If you can pay, then do pay. It's cheaper in the long run. You do not want to live the un-life I ended up with for more than a half-decade, when the fighting finally slowed down, and I realized I was alone, but not that I was debilitated.

VI.

So this year. For my birthday I am going to dinner with a friend on the Board. I look better, I think I understand better, and I think every step I take is infinitesimally closer to light. I am not younger now than I was eleven years ago. But I am vastly younger than I was two years ago.

As a matter of fact, I looked damn good yesterday in my purple skirt and green jacket. Like a fox, and getting stuff done. I went to two social or semi-social gatherings last week. So,
Happy Birthday to me! I am 51 today, unbelievable! Pretty sure I'll be standing with broadsword in hand by next year, fighting for myself and whatever worthy cause may come up.

I guess this is a risky and too-personal post. On the other hand, who else but an extrovert crusader with off-center but definite morals is going to tell you these things? Maybe it will help somebody down the road. It helps me to write it out.

I like tarot cards, but I would have used a swordswoman instead. Unfortunately in the photos I found, none of the woman had any clothes on, and several looked like they would impale themselves immediately.

That Number Nine

One of the great things about my husband: he was not above a Low Entertainment.  It must have been amusing to take around a naive Ann T. and introduce her to pool halls. Especially low-life joints like Joker in the Pack.

So I learned to play pool in crazy joints and, to eat dubious tacos in places like Elena's No. 2. They were delicious. If you turned the tortilla back, you would see what looked like McDonald's french fries in there instead of papas fritas. The tacos were only 59 cents and I quit looking.

So, we had a date, driving down the road. These were always great. We liked to talk in the car. My future husband would detour for pretty-looking roads or street-side marvels. There was never any telling where we'd end up.

"Oh, look, a carnival," I said. "I've never been to one of those."

One U-turn later, we were parking in the grass. He flipped off the ignition.

"What do you mean, you've never been to a carnival? Like since you were eight?"
"I mean never. My dad thought they were tacky." I paused. "Low class."

"Let's go." He bopped out of the car and I jumped out like a Mark in a box.

We were early, so it wasn't crowded. The cotton candy was spinning. So were the rides. We rode the Spinning Spider, the merry-go-round. We went up the Ferris wheel because I've always wanted to go on a Ferris wheel. I am deathly afraid of heights, too, but that didn't matter.

At the top, it stopped. We were the only ones on it, so it must have been ordained. He started rocking the bench.
"Stop it!" I screeched.
He laughed. "Come on, there's a rail."
"When we start down," I begged. Shoot, when would that be?

Once down, we were both happy. I had been on a Ferris wheel at last. He had scared the daylights out of me. We sashayed into Shill's Boulevard, i.e., the arcades.

I cannot throw. Much. But my husband insisted. I tossed ping-pong balls at glass jars and lost all my tickets. He tossed ping-pong balls and lost all his tickets. Of course he had at least scored. We tried other games and lost more tickets. It was great. Eventually my guy presented me with a stuffed armadillo. Hey! And we'd only worked our way down one side of the arcade. That was probably a river of red tickets, but I wasn't keeping track.

At the end of the row, we reached the Kentucky Derby, much less detailed than the one above. You throw tennis balls and they go into a funnel. Every time a tennis ball goes down, your horse advances a notch. The carney calls it out just like it's flesh-and-blood horses instead of flat pieces of tin notching across a green  billboard.   "Number Two coming from the outside, what a slippery track! Number nine still ahead by a nose!"

Clang clang. "And we have a winnah! Number Nine!"

For some reason, those tennis balls were working for me. I won three races in a row, lost one to Number Two, and then won three more. I won something much like a crackerjack toy each time. This enabled me to trade up for a pink bear or something. Then we laid down more tickets and played again.  And I won again.

The crowd was starting to pick up, because we were laughing so hard. And the barker was good at the patter, with a carrying voice.

"Come on up and try your luck!" The carney called out to the bystanders. "Can anybody beat that Number Nine!"

Years afterward, when I would score somewhere in life, my husband would look at me and yell, "Can anybody beat that Number Nine!!"

I tell you, Low Entertainment kicks butt!!!! I also won my own stuffed armadillo at the Kentucky Derby. A nice matched happy set.

101 Words: A Relic of the Hathaway ‘Cheap Period’

Dark lightning, no Still:

Soak two pounds dark Seaport coffee in ten cups of water 48 hours, stirring every twelve.

Find five clean wine bottles and corks, funnels, and coffee filters. Buy a quart of grain alcohol and a two-ounce bottle of real vanilla.

Boil two cups of sugar in ten cups of water until the water is pale yellow and a ‘feather’ of sugar floats on the boiling surface. Let cool while you strain coffee.

Mix the syrup, the coffee, the vanilla and the alcohol. Funnel into clean bottles. Drink it that weekend with friends. They will party all night.

Al Capone & The Long Cool Woman with the Bean Pan

I ran into a beer blog yesterday, and it got me to thinkin' . . .

Prohibition, part I.
My crazy Great-Grandfather ran away from home to be a cabin boy on a ship. He eventually went all over the world and ended up in Chicago. This was I believe in the Twenties.

He got a job in a grocery store and fell in love with Cinderella. She was the adopted child of a prospering grocer's family, and her lot was to scrape and clean for the besom (look it up, she was a you know what) and her Two Daughters. There was also a Son and a Boss-Daddy, so this doesn't Completely follow the usual cast. Plus, you know, Great-Grandpa was not really a prince.

Eventually they had their own grocery. Sometimes Capone's men would come by and say when they needed the truck. They got it when 'requested'.  Capone's people were, in all historical accounts, bloody and terrible men. But when Grandpa got the truck back, it was clean, full of gas, and ready to go.

Another time he was unloading crates of eggs and found liquor in the bottom. When I heard this story, I was very young. I thought The Outfit shipped whiskey in egg trays, which didn't seem very efficient. However, it was romantic, and I also mentally invented several different funnels which might make it work. What a help I could have been to Al Capone.

I've lately come to suspect that Great-Grandpa's grocery was mostly funded by truck rental. For one thing, he didn't keep it long after Prohibition. He retired, built a boat, and sailed it down the Mississippi and into the Gulf of Mexico. Did he go to Cuba to run rum and cigars? No, but I assure you he went on to other colorful pursuits.

He was never arrested.
That I know of.

Prohibition, Part II:
My reprobate great-grandfather and Cinderella had one daughter, and she was a young married woman during Prohibition. You could actually brew beer in limited amounts during that era. You just couldn't sell it or give it away.  I think it also had to be in certain percentages, a kind of 'near-beer'.

Well, Pa-Pa and Ma-Ma brewed beer the way some farm women do canning all year.  They rented a duplex, and they kept the beer all racked and hidden in the basement. One day Pa-Pa was at work, and Ma-Ma was hanging wash on the line and talking to the other ladies over the back fence? She heard this 'pop' sound. And then another. And then a sort of pop-gun fire. And then the odor of beer washed over the back yard. The basement was a-swim in beer. I am sure that was a cleaning job for the ages.

I don't know what my Ma-Ma told the neighbor ladies. That was in Chicago too. Maybe they had basements full themselves. And, as far as I know, they were never cited for this. But in that amount? It does make me wonder, again, about my illustrious ancestry. And Blood Will Tell.

Around and About the Still
Before my husband and I were married, we were broke. I personally do not care for beer, but my husband always enjoyed it. He did not like Bud though, or 'Circle G' or 'Brand X'. So one day, he invested an inordinate amount of money on brewery equipment.

A life filled with Projects is full of expectation and promise. It also requires Storage.

That was a small apartment. We had plastic bags of unused orange crush and Fanta root beer bottle caps in the kitchen. We had a bottling 'lever' (I guess that's what you call it) that would put those orange crush tops on recycled beer bottles. Oh, did I mention we had a bottle-washing operation also in that kitchen? It never looked sterile to me. Anyway, the stock pot would only boil eight bottles at once. I can assure you that you do not brew beer only eight bottles at a time. So there were used bottles, used clean bottles, and used sterile bottles. Sometimes the sterile bottles were not used in a timely fashion.

I only needed the stock pot back so we could eat beans on a regular basis. Those are cheap, and did I say we were poor? I can make the best pinto beans you ever ate, but only when I have a pan to do it in. Eventually we bought a second stockpot at some Army-Navy warehouse. And some more funnels and tongs. A bottle rack for drying. And some Pilsners. I'm pretty sure he could have been drinking Dos Equis by then. But there's no ambition in that.

We had racks of unfilled and filled bottles of beer awaiting 'tasting'. Those were in the dining room. And last of all, we had the actual brewing operation. This was much smaller than the bottling operation. It consisted of a couple of five-gallon water jugs (as I remember) with clear rubber pipes running back and forth between them. That was in the bedroom.

The yeast ferments the grain and malt and barley or whatever in a solution in the large jug. This rises. I would awaken every morning to the alarm clock, roll over, and see brown curd bloop through a tube first thing in the morning. After awhile, it got to me. We rearranged the bedroom so that the wort blooped on his side of the bed.

It was good practice in sharing, ah, resources. Since I had a drawing and a sewing project space, there was no reason for me to cut up stiff. I haven't mentioned my boxes of fabric or my dresser full of art and sewing supplies. So except for the wort-blooping and the bean pan, it worked just fine.

Now, perhaps you are thinking we had an explosion . . . that never happened. Perhaps you are thinking we got beer out of this . . . that never happened either. The beer was grainy-textured with undissolved yeast. Ick! Every time my husband opened a bottle, it smelled just like a Wonder Bread Factory. Brave woman that I am, I actually drank a sip out of his glass. Once.

Eventually, he redoubled his efforts in the sale of used kimono . . .

Birthday Thoughts

Today is my husband's birthday. If he had lived, I mean.

I was trying to think how to celebrate his life today. Next year I may have a more ceremonious plan. But today so far I have made sure BoyCat feels loved. He's been a little neglected-feeling lately.

Miss Ellen and I are going out. I go see my therapist. The sun is out.

For some reason, I have been thinking about the day we learned he got sick. He had a seizure, right on the bottom steps of the VA where he worked. He used to get there very early and have breakfast, work on his files before appointments. He was not yet fifty.

In truth, he had been hiding his illness from the both of us--not very well from me anymore--but I still didn't have the full. When he fell over with the seizure, he looked like a bum. Unshaven, in clean clothes at least, a big man passed out on the street. His I.D. got him into emergency right away. But someone found him first. Somebody made sure he got inside the VA hospital.

Today, whoever that was, because I never met you: thank you for stooping down and looking at the strange man passed out on the curb. Thank you for rolling him over and determining he needed help. I am grateful forever.

Giving Poetry Its Power

I think a good poem is a little word engine. It's more than a clever saying, it's constructed to move.

A poet uses one of any number of verbs that mean the same thing. The one they pick has a sound characteristic that drives the engine forward (alliteration, assonance, rhyme). Or alternately, the word has a root meaning, a little different from another word, that sticks an implication into the thought. Sometimes there's a conceit--an advancing comparison or metaphor, that strikes you with its brilliance. The best-known example of that is John Donne's compass in Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.--the perfect circle made by the travelling spouse and the stationary one.

Poetry has a rhythm. That's all that iambic pentameter, the rising and falling foot. (Trust the stuffy English to drag Latin into something easy, and make it intimidating.) The main thing to know, if you are not up on the iambs and the meter, is that rhythm advances the poem. Shakespeare's sonnets always sound like a heartbeat or a clock ticking. The rhythm reinforces the sense of a heart beating with love, the advance of time, the urge to be here now.

So every once in awhile (if not always) you should read poetry aloud. Give it the full play of the author's craft.  We listen to pop music and sing along. That's because poetry is better on the tongue than in the book.
----
I used to read poetry aloud on road trips with my husband. You would think, "oh, no" but it really worked out. One time I was reading Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn on a freeway. I got to the second stanza--

      Heard melodies are sweet/But those unheard are sweeter--

and he said "God!"

I stopped reading.
"No, that is the most beautiful thing I've ever heard in my life," he said, and switched lanes. "Start over."

Move Along, Baby

Okay, when I get down to fish hatcheries, you guys Know I am stumped for an appropriate subject.

Truth is, I am making so many tiny, insignificant changes right now that add up to the huge, but . . . the fish hatchery is more interesting.  What. I cleaned the toaster? You want to know this? Well, I don't want to tell you.

So today I rode Miss Ellen AND I took a walk. I was over at one of the neighborhood hubs, you know: drug store, bank, park, traffic, used book store (destination).  I swear I felt someone lightly pressing against my back. My husband.

I started to cry. Not bawl, please. But just weep. It struck me that the person who had been most disrespected in this whole thing was my husband. Nobody wanted to talk about him. They didn't want me to be sad. They want him to be over.  They wanted that about two days after.

This loneliness I know is not a disrespect to me. Well, it is. But mostly to him. And that's why I can't let it go.

But today, there's this light pressure on my back.

Getting all kinds of stuff done (not the toaster, actually). And I think I was a good wife.

Snapshots

Things I have learned in therapy:
There are happy memories buried under the bad ones. Once you loosen up the bad (by ranting and by whining, both ick), the good ones start drifting out.  I could hardly remember my husband when he wasn't sick. Now I remember he made me a key chain, a piece of wood he painted bright red, that would never get lost in the couch cushions. It worked, too. I found a beautiful scarf he gave me and wore it to show my therapist.

He gave me his last two dollars once when we were broke. I mean, truly broke. I kept it for thirty-six hours and then gave it back. It wasn't the money. It was the freedom that he really gave. A giving person: yes.

I remember that he was blocked in his career. We talked it over once while he took a hot bath and I sat in a dining chair in the doorway. I gave him encouragement and permission to choose. He worked out what he wanted over the next few weeks and went for it. He made it happen, and it was an adventure. It's the same thing as the two dollars, really. The permission to choose. The giving and giving back.

Stasis starts to go away, once this happens. The will to do things gets stronger by degrees.

I have done therapy before, and get tired of the 'blame the parents' stage PDQ. However, I have decided this stage is about constructing a  picture of MY deficits. It's about figuring out what's missing, starting when parents had the authority. In time the patient repairs those or learns an alternate strategy. In the long-term, it's about fixing the deficit, not fixing the blame.  Since I have done this before, I already knew that, so we are taking it a little differently.

We're going to do a thorough job this time, ranting, bleating, whining, blaming--within four walls--and analysis, strategy, and repair--everywhere. I don't want to start from sub-zero ever again.

No one of my siblings likes to get their picture taken. I have a picture of me and my brother and my sister taken shortly after my husband's death. We have our eyes closed, a funny expression on our face, and our mouths shut. Except me. My eyes are open, looking directly at the camera. Both my brother and my sister are sitting on their hands. We're on the beach. Don't you think we should be relaxed? Only I am. You can see my hands, too. That's because I just came out of the shadow of death. So I look like hell, too, but awake. Battered but untwisted.

Things went downhill after that. I'm still headed back up.

I want my husband back. 

I think, in a way, I will get him back.

Remembering the Dead

This is about widowhood. I think it will be enough of a 'how to prepare' and 'how to act' so as not to be a drag to read.

what you need to know first
At many great passages of life, the emotional, the financial, and the spiritual come together. People behave badly. The ceremony usually intensifies this and then wears it out. Everybody accepts afterward.

But death unleashes the primitive in the living. Normally unselfish people become selfish. They want more life. That translates into more sex, more food, more money, more wondering about what they would do if they were the widow or if they were the deceased.

When they wonder, they say things they ought not. They may also try to steal the pearls, the silverware, find out about the will, and hope they get enough from it to buy a new car. It does not necessarily indicate how much they loved whoever died. It's too complicated to be a measure of that.

This is not about love, it is about life versus death. Changes in fortune.

When it is about love, it is trying to get the last thing from the person they lost. They are filling an absence.

When it is about angry love, it is also trying to resolve the last resentments, unsaid conversations, old competitions, and unresolved guilt.

No closure is immediate. Therefore, people are not in their senses after a death.

the role of the widow or widower

Generally, I have noticed that the widowed person's first duty is to maintain the reputation of their deceased spouse--the funeral honors, the hospitality, for instance. Another example of this is not saying when they have terrible difficulty. To a widow, it might mean admitting that their spouse didn't prepare for them properly, or that the children didn't turn out right. They will continue to keep up appearances because of this duty.

The second duty is to help everyone else validate their worth to the deceased. Similar to this second duty, the widow is also asked to validate the faith of everyone else. This is all very difficult. You will notice that these duties are undertaken by the most bereaved person in the room.

This is where the impartial advocate comes in to say "It's time to rest" or 'We're not discussing that yet." Usually someone will step up to the plate for this, but it's nice to know in advance who that person will be.

the conversations

Given the many validations that a widowed person must give, you should know that the conventional condolence frequently serves the bereaved the best. By conventional condolences, I mean: "I'm very sorry for your loss." You leave out the example most of the time. You can get to it later, if it means so much to say.

There are other traditional things said that are hurtful; "You're life isn't over. You'll marry again. I don't know what you're going to do without the deceased." This is all best left unsaid.

Then there are the original comments. These rarely work. They turn the deceased into an object of the condoler's fantasy. The widow or widower does not recognize the person thus presented to them "Old J.B. was a heller/J.B. knew the most important thing in life was X" but he or she is forced, in order to meet duty #2, to listen to this skewed perception and either validate or correct it. Likewise, "Old J.B. never darkened the door of any church, but he was a good [religion]" is likewise wearing. The spouse knows the exact beliefs of the deceased the best. But the bereaved spouse is not up to a debate on religion at the moment.

These people often blur the memory of the deceased. 

One original comment that a person can make to a widow or widower is this:

"Tell me something about J.B. When did you meet him/her?"

You can ask for stories over and over, after a day, a week, a year. Most widows and widowers have been lost in emotional blankness and financial duties, learning new ways to live. You can make their loved one live again by listening instead of talking. You can also help them live again too, by validating the bereaved person's life.

I learned this from listening to ladies draw out from a bereaved friend they took to lunch. And from the kindness of strangers. And from personal experience. 

The Real Thing

We got married on February 17th. I picked that day because it was an anniversary of our first date. I learned on that date that you cannot talk about real feelings when eating a salad. I did not eat on our first date.

It was an old-fashioned kind of ceremony, but not a church wedding. We had an eloquent Justice of the Peace. She said the words of the service like they were totally new for us. Another couple invited to the wedding asked for her the next year.

We had the wedding in the somewhat rangy backyard and back patio of a friend's newly-purchased  'fixer upper'. The day before the wedding we pruned the trees in the yard, set up the chairs, and prepped all the food for the reception. We did not have a rehearsal, but we had a fun rehearsal dinner.

Girl stuff: My mom made my dress. It was off-white linen, waltz-length, not a scrap of lace anywhere. I had blue iris, yellow tulips, and orange lilies--it looked very spring. One carrot cake, white frosting, purple flowers. One chocolate cake, yellow flowers.

My husband made the music tape. I made the tablecloths. We had around fifty people attending. My father-in-law cried with happiness and everyone else was just--joyous. I cried a little too. My husband was the only one who wasn't nervous.

Then we stuck around instead of running off with new luggage. It was an afternoon dressy picnic.

My aunt gave me 16 wine glasses. She'd asked me what I wanted, and that was it "because we always break them". I meant by washing them in a porcelain sink, but she thought we were throwing them in the fireplace.

We had a good marriage. We were happy and we improved each other. Consoled each other. Made big plans and little ones. Argued. Talked things out. Did stuff together. And we laughed a lot.

Months after he died, I dreamed he was walking in a forest with his two favorite dogs, one of whom I never knew except through stories--so I know it was true, him beyond just me. We talked awhile in a clearing in the woods. He transformed into a ball of light before I was ready. The light folded under my ribs and moved behind my breastbone. Then I woke up.

Ten Most Nutritious Foods

When my husband was a freshman in medical school, they had a class that was sort of a 'grand rounds'--a guest speaker every week in alternative medicine, cultural awareness, medical research, and even finance.

One day he came home, very excited. "We had some nutrition researchers today in survey class," he told me. "They told us what the Ten Most Nutritious Foods are. You won't be surprised that broccoli's top of the list."

"No kidding," I said. "I guess it's good we eat a lot of it."

"It is," he informed me. "The Brassica family. Lots of vitamin A and C, the fiber, all that. It's like the nearly perfect food."

"Wow."

"Yeah, you won't believe what the second one is. I couldn't believe it myself." He waited until I asked.

"Beer," he said. "The research shows that the grain is good, especially in liquid form. And it exercises a benefit to the parasympathetic nervous system."

"No way," I marveled. "I would never have guessed it."

He laughed, and he laughed . . . . he laughed some more . . . . .

Swear I've Done One of Nearly Everything

The Field Trip
When I was fifteen, I was in a school band. We had a field trip to play music to another school, but our school did not have a bus. A caravan was organized, with band members who had cars ferrying those who didn't. We played marches and band arrangements of popular tunes. During the concert, my back, which had been giving me trouble, started to get worse. After the concert, I asked my band leader if I could call home sick. He agreed.

On the way home, my driver cranked up his radio to "O Black Water' by the Doobie Brothers, a song I had never heard before and still like. We parked in the back of the school, in a drive perhaps forty feet long and ending in a loading dock. I got out of the car. Another caravan driver turned left and gunned his engine, speeding along the drive. He hit me with his bumper and I was flung under the car. I watched the right rear wheel go over my leg and the face of one horrified passenger as he watched me slide under, in my slick-soled, black and shiny, band shoes.

The car was a rental car. The student driver had wrecked his own car the previous week, but his parents did not want him to be without transportation. Maybe it was the commitment to the caravan gig, I don't know.

Shock
When the wheel passed over, I was amazed to see, that unlike Olive Oyl in Popeye cartoons, that my leg was not flat. (!) No, but I had a compound fracture, and blood was spurting from a broken artery.

Lying on the ground, it seemed like I saw a hell of a lot of black ankles. Then my fellow band students went away, and I got the parade of teachers, coming to see me on the ground one-by-one. I resented this only from the teachers I had no relationship with, but I was friendly with all of them. I could see the light in their faces, too, and I saw it dim when they lied to me. At that moment, I saw everything and knew everything. The messy parts of life and its ambivalence had disappeared. I believe shock is a spiritual as well as physical condition.

I got first aid, ambulance care, surgery. The nurse kept turning my head away from the injury and I wouldn't let her. Finally the doctor told her to stop. I am a person who likes to see. And I saw, like I had never seen before. I was able to tap that and see better forever afterward. But not always, of course.

Aftermath
The world dropped around me again. It took me a year and one more surgery before I could walk. My big toe on that foot won't bend, which means it can't grip a shoe when I walk. It means I have to take care of that foot a little more carefully and that I will never train for the Boston Marathon. It also meant I got some slack at home and school, which I really needed. I have to say the incident, between what I learned about truth and how it got me slack, was an overall positive one.

The accident happened in February. Years afterward, in January or February, I would have terrible dreams of driving and having blood splash all over a windshield, or running over an infant who had crawled into my lane from the side of the road. That horror lived on.

At the time, everyone marveled at my positive attitude. They had no idea how much weight was off my back.

The Real Crime
My father is a high-functioning alcoholic, and a mean drunk. No one knows this about him except the people who live with him. The backaches I had were part of the stress from trying to take the hits for everyone else in the family. I moved from the object of hostility to the object of compassion--still not a person, you understand--but suddenly out of target range. I was assailed by neither the strong tyrant nor the weak tyrants who counted on me to be their advocate. I was able to excel in school, doing it at my own speed and on my own time, uninterrupted by drunken insults and arguments.

The day this happened, my father went to my younger sister and told her he needed her savings account to pay for my hospital bill. He also took my savings account. The hospital bill was paid by the driver's insurance. He does not remember doing this, although, I think he could remember it if he chose to. I had a job starting at age fourteen, and all of that savings was gone. None of my father's luxuries were curtailed.

This is the big reason I do not partake of suburban life, or daily drinking, or certain kinds of hypocrisy (other kinds of hypocrisy are okay and even necessary in life). It is also a big reason why college took me forever--not the disappearing savings account, but the drinking that made savings and order unattainable. The accident cleared things up by showing me a higher order and setting the world briefly aside. My father made the devastation in my world. When the cast came off, I became fair game again. He is the most sociable host on earth.

This Is Your Lucky Day

Reading Palms
The third story of the pictured building is the consultation room of a woman whom I will call The Gypsy. In the summer, The Gypsy sits outside in one of two yardchairs and tells fortunes to drunk marks for $5.00 each. Once, on my way to the grocery store, her mother offered to tell my fortune for free. She divined that a 'great weight' had settled on me, blocking my luck. A Very Serious Situation.

This great grey cloud would go away with a candle ceremony, conducted with a Catholic priest's help, and it would only cost me $1,000.00. The money would go in a box, sit on a priest's altar, and be blessed by the saints and the smoke of many candles. My life would be purified and my barriers would crumble. My Luck would Return! Participation was not required. She would take care of everything.

I told her I didn't think so. Finally she decided that $181.00 would be enough to satisfy the candlemaker, the priest, all the saints and leave a few pennies for The Gypsy's Mom. With a discount like that, I figured only one-fifth of that cloud would be lifted, so I told her no thanks. I did pay her $5.00 though. This story cost me a voluntary $5.00, and I can tell it over and over, although, not to the same people twice.

Doubled Down
One week, my husband and I visited New Orleans. We were walking down Bourbon Street, which is of course an inevitable consequence of going to New Orleans. A woman came up to us in the light of the street lamps. She was dressed in baggy jeans and a t-shirt. Her hair was not styled and she was neither ugly nor attractive. But the silver on her eyelids glinted in the lights of Bourbon Street. She looked up into my husband's face and breathed,

"Today is your lucky day."

She was mesmerizing. We followed her into a shabby storefront. I swear it was the silver eyelids.

A thin balding man who looked like the biggest loser ever stood behind a cheap counter made of old paneling and Formica. He held a dice cup in his right hand. We had a chance to win a prize. All of the prizes were on shelves along the back wall, which was a scabrous green. All of the boxed prizes were covered in a good half-inch of dust.

We got five rolls of the dice for free. Unbelievable! It really was our lucky day. Or night, really.
The man counted the dice so fast we were sure he was miscounting. We even tried to ask, but he just kept rolling, counting, putting the dice back in the cup. It was a lot of dice. And he was satisfied.
And we were Winning.

Then we had the opportunity to Double Down for two dollars. We had the chance to Double Down again. Finally we were at octuple chances for the prize! Oh, Wow, it was Our Lucky Day! And it only cost Eight Dollars for Eight Chances! We only needed thirty-eight more points!
My husband started to laugh. "No, thanks."

We would have run faster, except we were laughing too hard.

I was afraid to be in New Orleans streets after dark, so I had limited the amount of money in my bag before we left the hotel. We counted up our respective cash after Silver Eyelids and The Counter Man had their chance at it. One of the best $20.00 lessons ever. And hey, we were Doubled Down. Two of us learned it for the price of one.

a little higher on the trail

This is a follow-up to the new frontier post earlier this month.

I don't know if you'd call it work in the traditional sense, but I've been doing some metaphorical lifting and organizing on the 'big pile of miscellaneous ick covered in heavy fog' that sent me to the therapist in the first place. Then we started on small steps first. Once I get these on the near-automatic, I think the ways of a good life are going to come back full force. Then the heavy lifting will come in, but I don't worry about that the same way. Or maybe it's not time to worry about it yet.

Mainly I've been worried I'd lost my backbone. The big bad Ann T. who could live in RiverTown and make a difference and/or access her luck just seemed totally lost. She still winks in and out, but the fog is lifting more often and the little pieces, as I said, are getting organized. Actions that looked like unacceptable, limping compromises now look like solutions. That's not settling for second best; it's the new wind from the mountain top clearing my field of vision.

Nobody can work through this miasma except me, but as an extrovert I have needed to make it somewhat public so that I could examine it better. My therapist is of course trying to cheer me on, but I believe her when she says, 'See, see! We've only been doing this for a month, and just look."

I took her pictures of my husband and all my dead like the fourth visit. Something so simple: just to make them real and valued for fifty minutes. That was a true restoration. We are I guess eight or ten visits in.

So there's a way up, and I thank you very much for the fresh air and light that's made it through the grey. In case you are worried, absolutely you need not; you have propped me up already and restored much of my confidence. I am also very grateful for your well-wishes and prayers.

The Best Dog in the World

is of course the dog you love. I love Rosie. Best dog ever. I was not the only one to say so. She had a fan club, unofficial but unwavering.

We moved to that year's murder capital of the world (which happened more than once) when my husband entered medical school. I was afraid to be alone in the house and started lobbying to get a dog.  I like a working breed; they're intelligent and watchful and they respond readily to all situations. So I decided on a border collie.

She was tiny and cute. Her mother knew this was it. She kept walking back and forth with her last puppy, biting the hair at the back of Rosie's neck, lightly. I had a definite sense Mama was passing on the last-minute instructions on how to be a good dog.

The little baby threw up in my lap on the way home. After the first time, she sat on a newspaper on my lap and threw up two more times. The stuff must have been like styrofoam, expanding in the presence of atmosphere, because there was no way this tiny puppy could hold that much ick. A friend of ours said she got sick from reading the headlines from the murder capital of the world. After awhile, this did not seem like a far-fetched explanation. This dog learned more words than any dog I've ever known. She could almost read, I swear.

House-training went well. Teething didn't. Eventually she learned to chew on the legs of my husband's home-made blackboard and save everything else for us. And then the fun never stopped. I trained her in obedience, which was a snap. Then she trained my husband. Double snap. We took her any place not expressly forbidden to dogs by law, and she adapted to everything and behaved perfectly everywhere. We moved five times, and she kept up without missing a beat. But I think the best year she had was right before we moved to RiverTown, and she could swim in the local lake almost every day.

1. On Which Rosie Plays a Shell Game
Near RiverTown, there was a state park on the bayou. We would take her there on weekends. The first time, she found a turtle. "That's a Turtle," I told her. "Turtle. Turtle. Good Rosie."
The rest of the afternoon, she made fun of me. If she had been a pointer, she would have pointed. Instead, she would go down the path, come back, go back down, and wait by a turtle. Then she'd look at me: You want a turtle?
The crowning moment was when she leapt, slid, swivelled, and ended up staring at me with a turtle between her two front legs, grinning as dogs do: I can see them better than you, smell them better than you, and find them better than you. So is this the one you like?
"Okay, Rosie," I said, laughing back. "You win."
She pointed out no other turtles that afternoon.

2. On Which we Take a Trip
Rosie's staying at Grandma's house. On the second night, she goes to the front door.
"Woe, woe, woe," she says.
"They'll be back," Grandma replies. "They'll be back Sunday night."
Rosie goes into the living room and lies down.
Afterwards, my grandmother gets a dog.

3. In RiverTown, Rosie's guarding groceries, calm and doing the normal, while we truck them down the hall. A man passes by that I learn later is a prominent drug dealer on our street. For the first time since training, Rosie breaks her sit-stay. She goes after him: Leave my people alone. I collect her, but I do not correct her. Because I believe her.

4. In Which We Are Herded
I get a black and white cat; Daisy. The three of us spend weeks of free time where the cat sits by my lap and Rosie by my feet while I do homework. Now that all the family knows they're supposed to get along, the circle widens. Eventually, we develop an evening tableau:  the cat lies on one side of the room and Rosie on the other. Their bodies describe two ends of a perfect oval, in which my husband and I are encircled.

5. In Which Planning Allows For Smooth Execution.
Rosie and the cat have deals: Daisy can play with any toy, except a ball belongs to Rosie.
Daisy has first dibs at the water, no matter what. Rosie has first dibs on any disputable food, including cat food. Daisy has to eat on top of a dresser.
Rosie trains the cat to jump on the kitchen counter and knock the lunch meat package to the floor. A lot of ham and turkey disappears before we are trained to put the lunch meat away immediately. I am never sure the cat gets any of the lunch meat.

6. After my husband became ill, Rosie switched her allegiance to him. She never left, literally, the back of his knee for two solid years--whenever she could be with him, she was. If he was asleep, she waited at the foot of the bed. She had duties that were now inexorable. No one told her to do this. She chose it. Immediately.

When he died, her heart and mind broke. She became sick and vacant. I tried and tried, but I couldn't fix it for her. She was already with him when she took the last trip to the vet. She was fifteen years old.

Two days later, Daisy disappeared. She came back after three days. I think she was looking for Rosie, who had always been her wise counsellor. Whatever reason she had, when she came back, it had been satisfied.

Once my sister told me, "You learn unconditional love from a dog."
From Rosie, I learned what God had in mind when He made the angels. She understood better than most. Served more than most. Loved more than most.