Moved to Tears

The kids and I had waited a long time for this day, the day we would finally move into a house of our own after five years of apartment-living. And everything was going so well until our dog, usually the lovable lunk type, shot out our new front door like something fired from a circus cannon to attack a neighbor's 11-year-old Basset hound.

Hope, waiting for
"her kids" to come home. 

Everyone had been distracted. Hope was corralled in the fenced-in back yard, but was staring through the window like we'd abandoned her on Pluto, so someone felt sorry for her and let her in. When the movers opened the front door, and Hope saw sweet little Selma trundling along across the street, it was all over but the sutures.

Giving Hope the benefit of the doubt, she was in a strange place with a lot of commotion, she likely felt a need to stake out her new territory and protect us, and she might have mistaken Selma for a housewarming present. 

Selma's owner, a tiny woman in her sixties, had been walking her dog and minding her own business when Hope skidded up, clamped down on Selma's elephantine ear and wouldn't let go. One of the movers sprinted over, grabbed Selma's leash, and tried to kick Hope off. My daughter Sydney screamed. I went running, grabbed Hope, then had it pointed out to me by the mover at the top of his lungs, that Selma's ear was still trapped between Hope's teeth; yanking on Hope wouldn't help Selma.

What felt like hours in slow-motion was probably about 30 seconds, and Hope somehow became detached. I hauled her up in my arms yelling, "Stupid dog! Stupid dog! Stupid dog!" all the way across the street, up the driveway and into the house until I could dump her in the bathroom and shut the door.

I ran back to where Selma's owner, understandably distraught, was standing with the mover who was also shaken up. 

"I'm so sorry!" I said. I was in tears for Selma who, unbelievably, nuzzled my hand, making me cry harder.

"I need to wash my hands," said Selma's owner. "I have blood on them."

"Of course," I said. "Come in the house with me. Do you live on this street?"

That, I admit, was a self-serving question. The only thing that could make everything worse was Selma's owner living two doors down with all that ammo with which to bash me to all the other neighbors before I'd had a chance to make my own bad impression.

"No," she said, and indicated another street up the road from mine.

Oh, thank God, I sighed inside my head.

I escorted Selma's owner into the house where she nervously glanced around like a guest of the Munsters. I took her to the kitchen sink and she rinsed her hands.

"I have to take Selma to the hospital now." Her eyes were huge and her voice flat with shock. 

"Would you like me to go with you?"

"No."

Now really, what had I thought she would say?

"May I ask your name?" I queried.

"Karen O'Brien," she answered as we went on to exchange phone numbers.

"Please know that whatever it costs, this is obviously my responsibility and I will pay for everything Selma needs." 

"Thank you. I'll be back later," Mrs. O'Brien said, and left.

When several hours passed with no word from Mrs. O'Brien, I took the kids out to eat but left a note on our door so she wouldn't think we'd blown her off. While we were out, Syd and I made a stop at a pet store to buy Selma some treats. When we got home, we saw that Mrs. O'Brien had left a note in place of ours. It read cryptically:
                             
                                Selma and I stopped by. Please call.
                               ~ Karen O'Brien 

I called Mrs. O'Brien immediately. She was calm, polite and direct while telling me that Selma had surgery and the bill was $753.85. My brain glazed over and this soothing image arose of Hope's head on a platter, garnished with chocolates and chicken bones, her mouth stuffed with one of her own kongs.

Syd felt she should go too, so we walked up to Mrs. O'Brien's neat as a pin little brick house and knocked on the door. It was a storm door and when we knocked, Selma waddled up, forgot about her cone, and bounced off the glass. 

Mrs. O'Brien gingerly sidestepped Selma and let us in. She wasn't exactly warm; tolerant is a better word, but who could blame her? She indicated two empty seats then sat down on her sofa. Sydney offered the treats to Mrs. O'Brien with the first of the visit's many apologies.

And then Mrs. O'Brien smiled. "Oh, wasn't that nice of you." She offered Selma the treats but the dog didn't show much interest. "Well, I'm sure Selma will love these once she's feeling better."

When Mrs. O'Brien offered me a copy of the bill, I saw that one of the items was an "Elizabethan collar." Why should I have to pay for a fancy new collar? I thought, feeling a little ticked off until I realized that the Elizabethan collar was that cone Selma would be stuck in 24/7 for at least a couple of weeks.

I handed Mrs. O'Brien a check then glanced around the room. Beside the fireplace was a small Kelly green leather wing-back chair with little steps leading to the seat. 

"I take it that's Selma's chair,” I said.

"Yes." Mrs. O'Brien smiled again, this time fondly in the direction of the chair. "I didn't buy it for Selma, but she claimed it as her own. As she got older, she couldn't get into it by herself so now she has a little help."

There was a back support pillow reading WOOF in a bentwood rocker opposite the wingback. Clearly Mrs. O'Brien, who was a widow, cherished this dog and just as clearly, she was a very nice person. Syd and I teared up again as the three of us discussed what happened. Then Mrs. O'Brien, proving herself a straight shooter said to me:

"Well, I admit for a while there, I was thinking about bombing your house, but I'm pretty much over that now. And I'm pleased to see how seriously you've taken this. The two of you can stop by and visit Selma and me whenever you like."

Later we learned that Mrs. O'Brien was to have shoulder surgery in a few days, so the day after her operation, Syd and I walked over to her house with a plant. The storm door was closed, but the front door was open and a coloring book and crayons were scattered on the floor. In the driveway was a car with Massachusetts plates.

"Oh, how nice; Mrs. O'Brien probably has family helping her after her operation," I said. I knocked softly and when no one answered, I hung the plant in its gift bag on the door knob.

A few hours later, I received a text from Mrs. O'Brien thanking me for the plant and explaining that her daughter and son-in-law drove up from Boston to help after the surgery, but the surgery was postponed because Mrs. O'Brien wouldn't be able to oversee Selma's recovery with one arm. How could things get any weirder? Surely, next up, Selma would somehow manage to explode. 

"But it's fine," the text continued. "Now we'll just have a nice visit instead." 

Since moving day, when Hope "helpfully" introduced us by mauling her dog, Mrs. O'Brien has continued to allow us to befriend her. We've exchanged more texts and the other day Syd walked over to her house with a slice of cake. While they chatted, Syd offered to walk Selma any time and Mrs. O'Brien said that she would be happy to pay Syd for her services.

Replied my daughter, of whom I am immensely proud: "Oh, I think that under the circumstances, walking her for free is the least I can do."

According to My Specs

Last week for the first time, I couldn't find my glasses - because I wasn't wearing them. 

I might keep a few extra 

pairs of glasses around the house - 

or around my face. 

I yelled for my daughter who searched while I trailed her, whining over and over that I couldn't find my glasses without my glasses.

When my daughter found my specs, I put them on with the nerve-racked, shaky-handed gratitude of someone handed nitroglycerin tablets in just the nick of time. I sat on the edge of my creaking old quilt-covered bed, and it hit me: 

- I'm a woman of a certain age. 

- I need my glasses to find my glasses. 

- The bed wasn't creaking, it was me!

Then I realized that glasses had been dangling my future dotage before my failing eyes for years. 

I didn't have children until I was in my forties. When I was forty-three and getting an eye exam, the optometrist broke the news that it was time for my first pair of bifocals. Hand to God, the words that flew from my mouth at that moment were: "I can't need bifocals - I have babies at home!" 

For years I'd thought that dual umbilical cords were carrying sustenance from my ovaries to my eyeballs and that having children that late in life, my eyeballs were returning the favor. But for that to be true, my inner workings would have to look like an Escher print. 

Then there was the adult movie with a scene that depressed me for years. This movie (which I might have heard about, not necessarily seen!) depicted women, age 50-plus, getting a lot of, shall we say, attention, from younger men. A woman in one of the vignettes was wearing reading glasses and never took them off despite them slipping ever closer to the end of her nose. Now I understand that she didn't take them off because she needed them to see what was happening.

Forgetting where I've left my glasses is bound to happen again. And blaming my glasses, as though they're at fault by forgetting where they put my face, won't help. It's time to accept the facts. I'm getting older. 

But that doesn't mean I can't still love who I am, and even who I see whenever I look in the mirror.  And it doesn't mean I can't see myself in the best light possible even if I need the best light possible to see myself. 

We crawl, then we walk, then we walk a little slower. All the better for seeing what's most important and what is truly beautiful.  









  

Honey, People Like You Should Never Go to Those Places By Themselves

Recently I lost my mother. In its grief, my brain scrambles to recall details of her more recent self while things that happened years ago spring to mind in stark detail. My father, who died nearly 15 years ago, is often part of these recollections.

Image copyright, Teece Aronin

I have a cat named Kitt (hang in there; my parents will be back soon) who lives for the times she can spring onto a newly purchased or freshly laundered bedspread, smear her scent all over it, knead it, and just generally break it in for me. 

I also own a quilt, hand-stitched by my great-grandmother but stored away because Kitt would love to break it in for me, too.

The other day I brought home a store-bought quilt that reminded me of the one I keep in storage. The bonus was the sewn-on strips of colorful fabric and the rumply texture that would make any breaking-in Kitt could do less noticeable. 

The second the quilt hit the bed, so did Kitt. She rolled and stretched and followed her usual routine until the other usual thing happened: she got a claw caught in the quilt. With her arm stretched over her head, she freed herself with a thread-popping snap and I thought how badly I wanted to roll her up in the quilt and chuck her like a padded torpedo straight into a dumpster. Then I remembered a mess I got myself into with cats more than 20 years ago - and this is where my parents come in. 

I had just bought a little house. What would be nicer, I thought, than to adopt a cat to share it with? One weekend I drove to the nearest animal shelter and saw that the place was loaded with caged cats. An employee strolled over and pointed out a cage with four cats inside. Those four cats, she whispered, would be put down the next day if they didn't find homes this afternoon. I put my hand against the cage and one of the cats pressed its paw against my palm. I told the woman I'd take them all, keeping two and finding homes for two. It seemed so reasonable. 

Before I knew it, I was driving home with boxes of cats in the backseat. "Ninety-nine boxes of cats in the car! Ninety-nine boxes of cats!" I sang. The cats sang too. It felt good to save a life and saving four lives felt four times better. I got home, carried the boxes into the house two by two, then opened them gently so that the cats could become accustomed to their new environment. Cats are funny that way, you know; very timid when introduced to new surroundings.

After charging from their boxes like a swarm of killer bees, the cats made what appeared to be a coordinated attack on my house. One of them shimmied up the drapes where he hung like a spotted aerialist before flinging himself against the blinds. 

"Oh, my God, they're feral!" I screamed, as afraid of them as if they were bats or bears, even. I called my parents and blubbered into the phone. Somewhere in there, my mother caught the words cats and feral and figured out the rest. 

"Don't worry," she said, "I'll make some phone calls. We'll see you tomorrow."

The next morning my parents were at my door wearing reassuring smiles and leather gardening gloves. They helped me get the genies back in the bottles and loaded them in their car. My mother had found a woman who took in stray and feral cats. 

Before they left, my father gazed down at me with a loving but serious expression. "Honey," he said, "people like you should never go to those places by themselves." 

I don't get myself into feral cat predicaments anymore, but the reason for that is . . . well, I don't know exactly what the reason for that is because I adore cats, even ferals provided I know what I'm in for. But I like to think it's because I always listened to my parents. 

If they were with me now, I'd gladly listen to them all over again - even if the topic was feral cats.   

While Black

I was standing in a hotel elevator in Columbia, Maryland headed to the lobby. A black adolescent male stepped in shepherding a gaggle of five or six kids; cousins and siblings, I assumed. His charges were no older than eight with the smallest, the only girl, about four. The adolescent doing all the shepherding was as tall as a man, but his facial features said he was about 15. All of them were dressed for the pool. The elevator doors closed.

Image Copyright, Teece Aronin

"Wow, it looks like you guys are going swimming," I said to the younger ones.

"Yeah!" the goslings chorused.

"You are so lucky," I said. "I'm hoping that I get to go tomorrow."

The young man and I exchanged smiles. He spoke to the goslings softly and with a tone of bottomless patience.

"Now, listen to me very carefully," he said, and amazingly  they fell silent and all the little faces tipped attentively to his. "When we get to the lobby, we're going to be very quiet." His index finger rested gently against his lips and the thought struck me that this was a kid who lived his whole life gently.

"Okay!" the gaggle promised.

The young man looked at me and sighed. "All I can do is tell them, and know that it probably won't go well."

"You are doing a really great job," I told him.

When the doors opened onto the lobby I waited because one of the little boys was darting off the elevator. The young man in charge stopped him.

"We let the lady go first," he explained.

As I stepped off the elevator, the words, "Thank you sir," exited my mouth as naturally as if the young man had been an old one.

Behind me, the gosling protested. "Why did I have to wait?"

"Always be a gentleman," I heard as I walked away.

I got in my car thinking of a neighborhood boy who was a friend of my kids in what felt like another lifetime. His name was Paris and like the young man on the elevator, Paris was black, tall and mannish-looking. The last time I saw him he was 12. He was a little younger than my daughter, Sydney and a little older than my son, Jon. He spoke softly and had a dry sense of humor.

One day I was driving with the three of them in the backseat. Jon found a cereal bowl back there and put it on his head.

"Look! I have a bowl for a hat!"

Drawled Paris wistfully, "I wish there was milk in it."

Paris had a younger sister named Maya. Maya was very little and hadn't been around me much, so at her birthday party, fully expecting her to shy away, I asked, "May I pick you up?" And Maya shot her arms up in the air as happily as if I'd offered to take her for an airplane ride. 

One time my then-husband and I took Paris with us on a weekend trip. He, Jon and I were watching the news where one of the top stories was about someone's insistence on using the N word as part of his right to free speech.

"Jon, change the channel please," I said.

Paris' expression was even more serious than usual. "Thank you, Mrs. Aronin. You know, that word is offensive to people like me."

"It's offensive to me, too, Paris."

"What do you mean, people like you?" asked Jon.

"Black people," explained Paris.

Jon leaned back for a better view of his friend and looked astonished. "You're black?" he gasped, dead serious.

Not long after Paris' weekend away with us, his mother learned she had terminal cancer. She moved out-of-state with Paris and Maya to where they had family.

The night they left, Paris gave each of us something to remember him by; I got a "rock formation" from his aquarium and a can of Planter's peanuts. Maya gave the kids her hula hoop. When Paris' mother put the kids in the moving van and literally drove into the sunset, it was one the bleakest times the kids and I had ever known.

Paris' mother died soon after, and Paris and Maya moved in with the extended family. He and the kids keep in touch, but only sporadically.

The day after my exchange with the goslings, my daughter and I were in the hotel lobby. In walked the young man with four of his charges. 

"Syd, that's the kid I told you about," I whispered. "Doesn't he remind you of Paris? I still can't get over how well he handled all those kids."

"You really should go speak to him, Mom," she said. They were in a snack shop near the hotel entrance. The young man was patiently guiding the younger ones through their choices. I walked up to them.

"Excuse me," I said. Despite my smile, they all looked a little startled so I addressed the goslings first. "I was in the elevator with you last night, and I just wanted to compliment each of you on how grown up you all acted. You guys are pretty impressive kids."

"Thank the lady," the young man prompted.

"Thank you!" they chimed.

The little girl put her arms around my waist and laid her head against my side.

"And I wanted to tell you," I said, looking at the young man, "that you have a gift for working with little ones and it's obvious how much they respect you."

He looked shocked, then relieved, then delighted. Did he think I was about to criticize him? He put his hand over his heart and thanked me. I walked back to my daughter.

"Whoa, Mom, the woman working at the front desk was eyeing you like you would not believe."

I glanced over and saw that she was a young black woman.

"Probably thought I was harassing them for 'shopping while black,'" I said. "You know what I mean, right? Driving while black, running while black, walking while black. She probably thought that white woman better not accuse those kids of stealing."

"She was right to be suspicious," Syd sighed. 

"Yup, I know." I sighed too.

I wondered if that young man's parents had felt the need to teach him what so many black parents teach their already law-abiding kids: to keep their hands out of their pockets whenever they're in stores, to keep them visible if pulled over by a cop, and to be careful where and how they run. I'm sure there are lots of other lessons, too, ones I'm too white to have thought of. 

You know, we can argue until we're blue in the face, instead of whatever color we were born with, about the past acts of both sides, but children like Paris, and that kid at the hotel have to live through the present before they can live in the future and be the kinds of young, black men who'll help break the stereotypes.  

Paris was awfully young when his mother died. I hope she had time to teach him all the lessons.

Heart Murmur

When my mother was 91, sick, weak, and giving up her life, I wanted to tell the healthcare workers the things I knew that they did not.  

That she once had a heart-shaped face, flawless skin, and was a redhead with freckled arms. 

That I had pictures of her, looking beautiful, like a starlet, playing badminton in her bathing suit and reclining in the sun. 

That she was so quick to laugh - but never at someone's expense, that she met people where they were, openminded, fully expecting to embrace them, and that, even in my teens, when I "should have been" rebelling, I would curl up with her at the end of the day and spill every drop of tea in the pot.   

Her caregivers could not have known that when I was seven and had a tonsillectomy, she spent the night by my hospital bed because the staff couldn't get her to go home - this, in the days when kids were kept overnight, and their parents booted out. 

Her nurses and techs knew none of that and were kind to her anyway. But one impatient word, one careless yank on her gown, one exasperated sigh in her direction, and I would defend my mother as she had defended me in the face of child-hating neighbors with perfect yards and the first-grade teacher who said I couldn't read - with all the conviction of an outraged mother bear. 

Because our days came and went like heartbeats, but then there was a murmur, and now I saw my mother as she had once seen me. 

Absence Note

I've been worried a lot lately. I've been so worried in fact, that it's taken me from my blog entirely. The only times I've thought about Chipped Demitasse over the course of the last few weeks is when I kicked myself for neglecting it. This blog is very important to me yet I've been entirely absent from it.

A lot has been going on. My mother, who is dearer to me than even a wordie like myself can express, is facing serious health challenges. And I'm a single, working mother of teenagers, one of whom has temporary but difficult health issues of her own.

If being a single, working parent with a sick mother and a sick kid and all the responsibilities those things entail weren't enough, I decided to jump ship from the financial Titanic I call renting and am in the process of buying a house.

Buying this house included a three-day period of torturous anxiety where I obsessed over my monthly cash-flow, fearing it would become an even smaller trickle than it already is once I traded the "freebies" of renting (heat, maintenance, etc,) for the "costies" of home ownership. I earn a perfectly fair wage, but face it, life can be expensive for single parents. Those three days worrying about money are the kinds of times that try the souls of single, working parents and prospective home-buyers.

The utility bill was one of the things I worried about. I have no idea what heat and AC will run in this new place. The seller, as luck would have it, winters in Spain and summers in Northern Michigan, so there is no recent, realistic history of the house's energy use. And someone with the financial means to winter in Spain probably wouldn't turn down the thermostat at night even if he was here. I got so stressed-out over this phantom utility bill that I researched the cost of firewood in case our main source of heat had to be the fireplace. I'll love having a fireplace again; I just didn't want to have to sleep on the floor in front of it.

"Ugh," muttered my tried soul. "Ugh."

Then yesterday I sat myself down and lovingly chewed myself out. I picked up my smartphone, went to "notes," and tapped out a list of ways this house will benefit the kids and me in quality of life alone. So, not even thinking about financials, here is some of what I came up with:

- A two-car attached garage with two steps into the kitchen. On grocery day, that would eliminate the current trek across what feels like a football field in the summer and tundra in the winter, followed by a knee-grinding, nose-bloodying three-story ascent to the apartment. This aspect of renting, I decided years ago, is why God made teenagers.

- A semi-finished basement perfect for tossing said teenagers when I need some me-time. As a renter, me-time at home could be had only in my bedroom, or, if I needed quiet too, in the bathroom with the door closed and the fan on. I once consumed two glasses of Merlot and a Hershey bar with almonds while sitting on the lid of the toilet.

- Hardwood floors and a level, fenced-in back yard for our dog who has accidents in the apartment when nobody reads the signals in time to haul her down the three flights of stairs, like a grocery bag in reverse, and out to the football field/tundra in time to do her business.

- Money saved on dinners out, one of the few luxuries I allowed the kids. Their lives had changed so drastically when my husband and I divorced. I moved them out-of-state because we lived in a region with such a high cost-of-living, I couldn't find a job that would support us in anything higher than near-poverty; sadly, I'm not exaggerating. But with a back yard, we can roast hotdogs and marshmallows, and maybe restaurants won't seem that important anymore.

The kids and I still laugh about a night years ago when we were still a nuclear family. We were out on the deck roasting marshmallows when my daughter's caught fire and in her surprise, she whipped her stick behind her. The marshmallow hurdled through the dark, blazing like a meteor. To kids, mine anyway, laughing yourself sick over a fiery, flying marshmallow beats a restaurant hands down. 

Thinking about all this, I calmed down. Then I did the math I had done days ago but had gotten too freaked out to remember I had done. I calculated that with a fixed-rate monthly mortgage roughly half the amount of my rent, and with rent going nowhere but up, there was no way, short of buying in Bizarro World, that a house wouldn't be better for me financially. And I'm grateful to have a bit set aside so that unexpected maintenance costs won't be AS big a disaster.

Those three days of abject terror taught me some things. First, when I examined the benefits of buying the house, my blessings politely raised their hands asking to be counted - blessings like my kids and the fact that I can buy a house at all.

With blessings like those, why should I worry? Besides, thinking is helpful; worrying isn't.

The Long Arm of the Law

What do Matt Dillon, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp and my mother have in common? Each could put the fear of God into any gunslinger, or in the case of my mother, into her runny-nosed, mercurochromed, wisenheimer kids every time one of them lipped off at another. None of us would have dared lip off at Mom. 

You could be in any room in our house and my mother could rap you in the back of your head from any other room in the house, and not take so much as one step in your direction.

You'd be standing in the middle of the living room basking in the glow of having just called your brother a sticky stalactite booger, Mom would be in the kitchen and WHAP.

She could bounce braids with one of those four-fingered love taps, love taps that seemed devoid of any love short of the kind in Scared Straight. These raps in the head never hurt, but they got our attention. And in truth we knew she loved us with everything she had.

Eventually my brothers and I resorted to experimental methods of insulting each other hoping to fly under our mother's radar.

We tried whispering our insults upstairs when Mom was sweeping the sidewalk . . . and WHAP.

We passed notes to each other in the basement while Mom was in the bathtub and . . . WHAP.

We coded messages to each other using secret decoder rings while Mom was next door having coffee and . . . WHAP. 


I wish I could describe to you what these encounters with our mother looked like, but it's a little like that problem people have after near death experiences when they find human speech wobbly, puny and inadequate to the task of describing something so astonishing.


One day, years after we'd grown up, my brother was driving somewhere with his kids, my mother, and me. My little nephew was on the driver's side in the back seat and my mother was on the passenger side up front. Then my nephew said something of which my mother disapproved and  . . . WHAP. My nephew never saw it coming.

"Whoa! What was that?" he yelped, not hurt, but surprised.

"That son," said his father, "was the long arm of the law."