Everything I need to know is in a stock pot of minestra maritata: my Easter Sunday reflection

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Ingredients:
• Vegetables
• Herbs
• Olive oil
• Water
• Sausage
• Bread
• Milk
• Salt

Directions:
1. Make a paste
2. Cook the paste until it gets hard to stir
3. Add water
4. Add chopped vegetables and simmer
5. Make meatballs
6. Add meatballs
7. Top with grated pecorino and eat

I can hear the groaning already as you ask, “What kind of a recipe is that?” And that, my friends, is part of the lesson.

Lesson 1: Don’t skimp on the olive oil.


My grandmother was almost 103 years old when she died, in her home, with no underlying health issues and no medications. This is what she ate every day of her life: pasta, at least once a day, with marinara sauce; a simple salad of fresh greens, cucumber, a chopped tomato, olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper; a cup of coffee every morning, buttered toast, maybe an egg with salami scrambled in or a slice of bacon; a piece of fresh fruit at least once daily; and meats and vegetables cooked in olive oil. She bought olive oil by the gallon.
I see my family doctor once a year, and he checks my cholesterol. I’m overweight, I eat a diet heavy on meats, fat, and olive oil. I have 2 eggs for breakfast every day, and there are times during Lent when I may eat a half dozen eggs on a Friday. My doctor tells me, “Nobody has an HDL level as good as yours.” Trust me, don’t skimp on the olive oil.
To make the paste, I used olive oil, carrots, celery, and fresh basil leaves. I know that I used 3 carrots because that’s how many were left in the bag. I believe that I used 4 celery stalks. I used a whole clove of garlic. Perhaps you like onions? I don’t, but if you like onions, by all means, use them to make your paste. Use enough olive oil to make a paste. I added basil leaves until I liked the odor.

Lesson 2: Be open to change.


I used a food processor to make the paste. My grandmother had a variety of hand implements that she used for grinding and chopping, including a nut grinding contraption in a jar top and a mortar and pestle.
For most of her life, she reheated food on top of the stove in a pan. Sometime in the 1990s one of her grandchildren gave her a second hand microwave. It was a game changer for Grandma.
My grandmother didn’t have a food processor, but if she did, she would have used it.


Lesson 3: Save everything.


The celery I used had been in a plastic bag in my freezer. It had become too limp to spread with peanut butter, so I tossed it into a gallon size zipper bag that I keep in the freezer. Practically any vegetable that’s past its prime can be repurposed for soup, pesto, or something else. I save the trimmings from asparagus, broccoli, celery, carrots, greens, squash, etc. for making soup stock.
The basil will only be fresh for a few days before it will start to wilt. I don’t dry herbs, but rather, I put them in zip lock bags and toss them in the freezer. Then at some point in the middle of winter, I’ll find a baggie full of fresh frozen basil, and it will feel like a gift from Santa Claus. I take those frozen basil leaves and crumble them into sauce, pesto, meatballs, or anything else that needs fresh basil. Don’t use dried basil. Trust me.
After the paste was finished, I scooped it into my biggest stock pot and turned on the heat. I stirred it with a wooden spoon, and cooked it until it started to be hard to stir with the spoon.

Lesson 4: Don’t beat yourself up for not being perfect.


Did a former Supervisory Public Health Veterinarian seriously just suggest using a wooden spoon? Yes, she did. If you use a metal or plastic spoon to stir the paste, you’ll end up with either a plastic or metallic flavor. If you are concerned about food safety, cheap wooden spoons are readily available at discount stores. You could use it once and toss it, or you could attempt to put it through the dishwasher until it finally falls apart.
I also used a wooden cutting board for chopping my vegetables, just because I don’t have a glass cutting board that’s big enough for large vegetables. However, there is one food safety rule that I don’t break: never use a wooden cutting board for meat.

Lesson 5: Don’t worry about everything being exact. That’s not real life.


I kept a second stock pot on the stove with cold water to add to my paste after it had cooked. I poured in about half a stock pot full of water, stirred, and brought it to a simmer. Then I put the cover on the stock pot while I chopped the vegetables.
What kind of vegetables should you use for the soup? I used scarola, chard, one zucchini, a big bulb of finocchio, and a few sprigs of prezzemolo. I don’t know how many pounds of scarola or chard; I just grabbed one bunch of each. I’m not normally a fan of zucchini in soup, but there’s something about this minestra where the zucchini just works perfectly. Maybe you like spinach or kale? Go for it. Maybe you have some lettuce in the refrigerator that’s a little past prime? Yes, you can cook lettuce, and it goes well with soup. I don’t recommend leaving out the finocchio.

Lesson 6: Enjoy the journey.


It’s time to start adding that mountain of chopped vegetables to the soup. Although the leaves of the finocchio resemble dill, they taste like licorice when eaten raw. I can’t resist this any more than I can resist black jelly beans. This minestra is as fun to make as it is good to eat.
Bring the soup to a simmer again, and put the cover back on.

Lesson 7: Live every day as if a major economic depression is coming.


For the meatballs, I’ll use sweet sausage, an egg, and bread soaked in milk. In the freezer I have a collection of bread bags, each containing the tiny ends of gluten free bread that aren’t big enough to toast or use in sandwiches. I soak these in just enough milk to get them moist. Loose sausage is best, but I used sausage in casings after removing the casings. Most likely the sausage casings were cleaned and processed in China. Although we have a ban on importation of pork products from China due to African Swine Fever and Foot and Mouth Disease, I know from my time working for USDA that we permit exportation of pork casings to China for cleaning, and then allow reimportation of these casings for making sausage in the USA. We know that these casings are USA origin because China promises that they really are from US-origin pigs, and we know that we can trust the Chinese with important details such as the true extent of African Swine Fever and COVID-19 in China – right?


You may have gathered at this point that I have a freezer full of tiny bags, and I do. I save bones for making soup or to flavor sauce. I save chicken carcasses and chicken necks for soup. I learned from the best: my grandmother had the “can” underneath her sink, and nothing went into the can unless every possible edible use had been made of it. The can contained coffee grounds, egg shells, and spent soup bones. And, even these items were repurposed as fertilizer for the garden.
Right now, I still have my job, and I’m still getting paid. I am extremely grateful for my job, a roof over my head, and food on the table. I’m also no fool, and I know that in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, my State is broke and the economy is collapsing. The governor has already announced a pay freeze. If I’m laid off in a few months, I will be forever grateful for the opportunity to serve and for the best job I’ve ever had. I will be grateful that I was taught the skills I need to survive an economic depression by someone who lived through the Great Depression.

Lesson 8: Don’t try to force things together that don’t fit perfectly together.


The meatballs need to be small, and they need to cook in the soup. If you try to do this differently, the meatballs and soup won’t be a perfect union.
My marriage was a disaster. We had some things in common: He was a dairy farmer, and I grew up on a farm and had worked as a dairy veterinarian. Other than that, neither one of us fit into the world of the other. He could be funny, charming, and a gentleman if he felt like it. He was also dumb as a box of rocks, crude, misogynist, and racist. His list of acceptable dinners included meat, potatoes, and seasoning salt. Whenever I tried to cook a meal that my son and I would enjoy, he referred to it as “guinea food.” He was incapable of having an intelligent conversation about anything. He mixed like oil and water with my family and my faith. Although he had had been divorced for over a decade, he still maintained an unhealthy attachment to his ex-wife including financial entanglements. He would shout or blurt out rude, insensitive remarks to my family and friends and then forget about it. My family and friends had longer memories than that.
The only time that we got along well was when we were alone. Even though he didn’t fit into any other part of my life, I tried to get the meatballs and the soup to complement each other. It didn’t work.
Don’t make the meatballs too big, and don’t brown them before putting them in the pot; there’s no seasoning in them, and they need to absorb the flavor of the soup.

Lesson 9: You can judge a book by its cover.


This morning I brought a piece of ricotta pie and some taralli to my neighbor, and we did the arms-extended-faces-turned-away passing of the plate. She’s been very good to me during the stay at home order; she always asks if I need anything when she has to go to the store, and she scored a package of toilet paper for me a couple of weeks ago. I knew the moment I met her that she was a good person and she would be a good neighbor.
This has nothing to do with the minestra, but it does bring me to the next important lesson.

Lesson 10: Take time to shower and change your clothes during the quarantine.


When my neighbor brought me a bowl of fresh fruit salad, and I was still in my bathrobe, and she asked me if I was well, then I knew it was time to shower and change into my day nightgown.
While I was in the shower, I let the meatballs simmer in the soup.

Lesson 11: Take your time.


There’s no hurry for the soup or the meatballs. Let it simmer. The meatballs won’t over-cook. The soup won’t over cook. They’re both happily simmering together, each absorbing the flavor of the other. The only way that you can screw this up is if you try to cook it too hot and too fast.

Lesson 12: Don’t presume to know the ending….but plan ahead.


The very last thing that I add to the stock pot is salt. Sometimes when I make soup, I don’t need to add any salt at all. This time I poured some into the palm of my hand. I’m not sure, but I believe in the English measurement system the “palm” is equivalent to roughly one tablespoon.
I have had this website for years. You may have noticed the there was a long drought in posts between 2017 and 2020. My ex-husband used to ask, “What the hell do you need a website for?” At times I used to ask myself, “Why am I paying for web hosting on a site that I’m not using?” “What am I going to do with Janes-world.net?”
My friend and mentor Donna, my “adultier-adult”, introduced me to Chris Guillebeau last year and his daily side hustle podcast. I realized through listening to Chris that I could do many things with this website if I so choose. I could start a business selling things such as braided rugs that I can sew by hand, that would take a year to make, and then I might be able to pay myself a penny an hour if I could sell one. I could paint pretty pictures of birds on garbage cans and sell them. (Lately I seem to have a fascination with finding a little trash bin with a bird painting on it, but I just can’t seem to find the right one.) I could write guest blogs for other bloggers and then try to redirect some of that traffic back to Janes-world to sell google ads. I could direct traffic to my online AVON store to get more sales. Or, I could just continue to write stories about cats or whatever else I choose to write about. The point is, the door is still open, and I never know what direction life will take me next.
Remember before adding the salt that if you serve the minestra with pecorino Romano, the cheese is also salty. After the salt has been added, give the pot a stir and one final taste before ladling it into a bowl. Grate a generous portion of pecorino on top and serve immediately.

Lesson 13: Don’t skimp on the pecorino.


Yes, you paid $20 per pound for that wedge of heaven to come across the ocean from Italy, pass USDA inspection, pass through a warehouse or two before ultimately ending up at the supermarket. Nevertheless, pecorino goes with this minestra like ice cream goes with hot apple pie. Enjoy this experience.
Indulge, but remember to take care of that pecorino. It likely took some abuse at the grocery store where they cut it into hunks and packaged it in plastic. Immediately get it out of that plastic when you buy it, and wrap it in plain white or brown paper. If it starts to dry out, wrap it in a moist piece of paper to make it easier to grate. And don’t forget to save the rind and the tiny hunks of cheese that fall out of the mouli; you never know when you may need these to flavor a minestra.


Buona Pasqua

COVID-19 and the moment I realized my small world was coming to an end

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Iris Dement

But I can see the sun’s settin’ fast
And just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on I gotta kiss you goodbye but I’ll hold to my lover
‘Cause my heart’s ’bout to die
Go on now and say goodbye to my town, to my town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on my town, on my town
Goodnight, goodnight

A little over a week ago, Father asked for a few minutes to speak during the evening Vigil mass. I was expecting to be told that we would not be having mass at church until the coronavirus crisis was over.  The priests and eucharistic ministers had already stopped distributing both species over coronavirus concerns, and I had been unable to receive for over two weeks.

That wasn’t the announcement, however, and it would be several days before masses were discontinued throughout the Archdiocese.

I was expecting an announcement concerning the cancellation of that evening’s dinner to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and St. Joseph’s Day.  The plan was to have good food with live music and singing, and a chance to celebrate Italian and Irish heritage.  Instead the dinner had been scaled back to distribution of take out containers at the door of the Parish Center.  I was disappointed because I had good reason to celebrate:  the neurologist said that I could drive again after 6 months of being dependent on my son, my brother, my coworkers, Uber, Amtrak, and BART. 

That wasn’t the announcement, either.

Father started to announce that the parish school would be closing…. (I’m not surprised because all schools in Connecticut will be closed by the end of the week)…. permanently after 155 years.  Did I hear him correctly?  He was talking about the perfect storm that he brought up at mass last fall, a combination of less children, less faith, and less money.  The school, my son’s school, my mother’s school, the oldest continuously operating school in the archdiocese is closing its doors in June.

I struggled to process what I had just heard.  How could a school that just a few years ago had an enrollment of over 200 students be closing?  What had changed?

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The class of 2013, 7th grade

If someone asked me why I consider the school closing to be the end of my world as I know it while all the world is struggling with the COVID-19 infection, my explanation would go something like this:  Imagine that you are a single working mother raising your child without the benefit of child support, and you recognize that there is something unusual about your child.  Although it is an enormous financial sacrifice, you decide to enroll your child in the parish school because it seems to have the structure that he needs.  Your son enters kindergarten, and the teacher immediately recognizes that he may have a developmental disorder.  He’s evaluated by a child development specialist at a major regional medical center in Connecticut and is diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.  My son’s small school had one classroom per grade level and no resources for special education teachers.  Because catholic schools are private, the school was under no obligation to provide a “free and appropriate public education.” 

At this point, most small private schools would have metaphorically packed my son’s bags and seated him on the curb for pick up.  Instead, the principal and kindergarten teacher swooped in like angels sent from God.  They gave my son structure and goals, and they did everything in their power to help him to be successful academically and socially; these two women and his teachers in the following years continued to give him that support until he graduated.  These amazing women – P. Devanney, L. Barbaret, V. Berger, N. Groth, K. Sharpe, D. Hayden, M. Donovan, P. Spaziani, M. Hubert, K. Hicks – helped me to raise this child as if he was their own.  He became an altar server in fourth grade and continued to serve through and beyond high school, and the priests served as his mentors and role models. The principal nearly broke down in tears when she called his name at eighth grade graduation.  I witnessed God and faith at work in this school and in these women. 

8th grade graduation

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For all but the last two years of my son’s catholic school years, I was still unmarried, and we lived in a house on the south hill in town.  We heard the church bells ringing the Angelus every morning, noon, and evening, and we had an unobstructed view of the church from the balcony on the front of the house looking east.  I could watch my son walk to school from that balcony, walking down the hill, crossing Main Street with the assistance of the crossing guard, walking down the other side of Main Street, then losing sight of him briefly through the trees until he reached the pizza parlor and started to climb the church hill.  Then I knew he was safe.

I often wonder what a “better life” means.

I bought that house when my grandmother was still alive, and the backyard connects with her backyard.   Her father and uncle came here alone from Italy to work on the railroad that used to run parallel to my street and in front of the lumber yard below me.  After five years, her father had saved enough money to buy a house, and he booked passage for my great-grandmother and grandmother on the passenger ship Giuseppe Verdi.  All of my grandmother’s aunts, uncles, and cousins on her mother’s side eventually found their way to the USA and to this neighborhood.  They built houses around the neighborhood with foundations made by Italian stonemasons from cut granite.  The family names were Serluco, Angino, Schibeci, Indino, DeLutri, Andreano, Bruno, Mancuso, Giannatassio, Indino, Giarnese, Gubetta, and others.  Some of them “Americanized” their names:  Zecchino became “Zechin”; Travaglini became “Travaglin” pronounced without the -gli.   My grandmother Americanized her name to Jennie.  Everyone knew everyone and all my aunts were still alive when I was a child. The had well-kept yards and grew Marzano tomatoes and Italian pole beans in their gardens. They sat on their porches while they gossiped in Italian and laughed.  We went to parties at the Knights of Columbus and the Garibaldi Club.

My grandmother was one of the smartest women I have ever known.  When she arrived in the USA, she was placed in the “opportunity classroom” with all the children and teenagers who couldn’t speak English.  She took the “opportunity” to learn to speak English perfectly, fluently, and without an accent.  Upon mastering English, she advanced three grade levels in a single year and ultimately surpassed her peers and graduated a year early.  She met my grandfather, a jovial Sicilian man, and they married in the 1930’s and inhabited the upstairs apartment in her parents’ house.  My grandmother would continue to live in that house, the one with the backyard that connects to mine, until her death. 

My mother dressed for her First Communion

In 1940 my mother was born, and Grandma quickly realized that she had a smart and precocious daughter on her hands.  Grandma sent my mother to the catholic school a year early, as a four-year-old, because she was ready.  My mother proved this on the first day of school:  Grandma had hired an older girl to walk her home from school, but my mother didn’t want to wait for the older girl, and she marched herself home across town on her 4-year-old legs.  After that she walked to and from school alone every day.  My mother celebrated her first communion in second grade, while attending the school, and graduated from eight grade in 1953, the youngest student in her class.

Mom at her 8th grade graduation

In 1955 a flood leveled much of Main Street, but the church and the school were spared.  The Governor gave special permission for the schools to not have to complete 180 days that year, just as we are seeing today with the coronavirus outbreak.  The south side of Main Street was never rebuilt, and a once thriving small manufacturing town has steadily declined economically for the past 65 years. 

The flood of ’55. The church is visible in the upper left

There used to be a Grant’s department store below me on Main Street, almost directly in front of my house, but Grant’s moved out of town, then became King’s, then became Ames, before finally closing for good.  The spot where Grant’s was located became a short-lived “mini mall”, then a skating rink, and now it’s a storefront church.  The A&P grocery store that Grandma and I used to walk to next to where the railroad tracks had been closed long ago, and has since been a video store among other things, and is currently an auto parts store.  The First National grocery store moved out of town in the 1970’s, and the building was purchased by the State and used by the Community College.  Mencuccini’s grocery store, next to the old Grant’s, became an IGA grocery store before closing its doors a couple of years ago.  There used to be a woman’s clothing store, children’s clothing, a bridal shop, a hat store, a shoe store, a dry cleaner, a florist, banks, more bars than what was appropriate for the size of the town, restaurants, mom and pop groceries, an appliance store, furniture stores, gift shops, a daily newspaper, etc.  Now we have a pawn shop, a cannabis dispensary, tattoo parlors, boarded-up banks, empty store fronts, and multiple antique stores that are rarely open.  The lumber yard directly below and in front of my house has been abandoned now for fifteen to twenty years.  There’s an empty factory building across the street from where the railroad tracks were; the old railroad bridge at the end of the street was taken down in the 1970’s.  The other old factory to the left on Bridge Street, adjacent to the river, gets purchased by a new developer every few years.  All of them have promised to put in an upscale restaurant, mixed office and retail space, and luxury condominiums.  I’m not sure what causes them to give up; I know part of it is that the flood did a lot more damage to the structure of the building than is readily apparent. Even Nader broke his promise of converting an old factory to a museum, and took the easier approach of buying a recently closed bank.

Watercolor of our Church. I won this in a raffle to benefit the school.

It’s not all bad:  there’s a thriving health food store that probably got a huge boost to their business when the last grocery store in town closed; there’s an old movie theater that’s been converted to a dinner theater; there’s pizza parlors that have been around since I was a child that will probably still be in business 50 years from now.  The Community College is the jewel of the east side of town.  More recently one of the old factories in the west end was renovated and has become a beer distillery.  It appears to be doing well, and it gives me hope.  This is a building that I considered a prime spot for a department store at one time; in fact, starting twenty years ago, I used to write emails to major retailers telling them what a great town this is, how many large properties are available for lease, how there is no significant retail for miles to the west to the New York border and beyond, and nothing for miles to the north into Massachusetts.  It would have been a gold mine for a major retailer to open here, and a huge benefit to a town.  This is a town where one can’t even buy a pair of underwear without having to get into a car to drive somewhere because public transportation in this region has gone the way of the railroad.  Instead the major retailers built new buildings on the edges of T-town.  I stopped sending those emails about a decade ago. 

8th grade graduation dinner, 1953

Money can’t but faith

The town knocked down the house kitty-corner to me a couple of months ago.  The house on the east side of my yard sits empty.  The house behind me, next door to my grandmother’s house, is occupied by drug dealers, and 2 or 3 police cars visit this tiny neighborhood on a dead-end street several times each week.  The house on the other side of my grandmother’s house burned down 25 years ago and has never been rebuilt; the overgrown trees and hedges obscure the view of cars trying to cross the hill.  The house to the west of that house was knocked down by the town last year as well.  The short, thigh-high hedge that used to neatly delineate the boundaries of the yard of the house where two of my aunts lived has now been allowed to grow to a height of over 30 feet by the current owners;  they seem to be nice people, but apparently they value their privacy a great deal.  My house also is one wave in a sea of decay.  The tenants who occupied my house during the period of my failed marriage damaged my house beyond description; more exactly, it was their four cats and their urine that destroyed the house to the point of being uninhabitable and unsellable.  The house sits empty just like my neighbor’s house.

This past week I’ve spent a lot of time looking at pictures of my grandmother’s hometown, and I’m struck by the irony of so many circumstances.  Her hometown was stunningly beautiful with unbelievable views of the mountains.  They left Italy in droves for a better life, and she came to settle here, on the steep hill with the parallel streets, much like her hometown in that respect.  But the view here is not beautiful, and even when the town was more economically sound, the view would never have matched what she left behind.   And now this place that she and her family came to for a better life has become the place to leave for a better life.

I work in New York state now.  I used to commute over three and a half hours daily, but ultimately, I had to get an apartment within walking distance to work when I couldn’t drive.  It’s a great job, but it’s in a metro area, and the rent is high.  I’m still paying a mortgage on an uninhabitable house in Connecticut, so I work a second job in private practice on Saturdays and Sundays to try to make ends meet; I usually get one weekend off per month.  My brother is helping me to repair the house, and I’m hoping that it will be inhabitable again soon.  I often wonder what a “better life” means. 

8th grade graduation dinner, 2013

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What happens when not attending mass becomes the new normal?

I carried home the containers of take out food and maintained my composure long enough to tell my son that the school was closing before I went to my room and cried.  There are peaks and valleys in population, and if Father just waits this out for a few years, won’t the school recover?   I had seen the last two remaining parochial schools in the neighboring town consolidate after having four independent parish schools at one time.  There were so few students that the boys’ basketball team in the T-town school was co-ed.  It was just seven years ago that I was sitting in the bleachers watching my son’s basketball games.  I pitied that poor school.  T-town was much larger than our town, but certainly nothing like that could happen to our school, right?

Sadly, I am wrong.  There are two problems in Father’s perfect storm that are difficult but can be resolved.  Population is cyclical, and Generation Z children will swell public school enrollment.  Lack of finances is challenging, but could be solved if we all dug deeper into our pockets.

Money, however, cannot buy faith. 

Celebrating 150 years of the parish school

We celebrated the 100th anniversary of the church building five years ago along with the 150th anniversary of the parish school.  At that time, sitting at the celebration dinner, surrounded by faith and love, I never would have dreamed that the school could close; and now the new normal will be having no parish school. The church is now in desperate need of expensive repairs, and I fear for the future of our parish.  In the past two years, I’ve seen multiple churches closed and parishes consolidated throughout the Archdiocese.   With the church being closed to public masses during the coronavirus crisis, what happens when not attending mass becomes the new normal? 

8th grade graduation ceremony, inside the Church

The Politics of Pussy

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After witnessing how deeply divided the nation is over the results of the presidential election, I have made a vow to be a better listener. I will try to listen without judging. I will try to listen without finger pointing. I will try to truly understand the opinions of others and try to find common ground. And I will start with the cats.
Yes, the cats. The mood of the cats on the farm has been as tempestuous as that of the humans. I have tried to not only give voice to their concerns but also to really listen to them and to try to understand where they are coming from. I hope that you will be able to do the same.

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This is Tom.  He voted for Donald Trump.

Tom is the oldest, and although the other cats don’t realize it, he was actually born in the farm house and is now two generations removed from the barn.  Tom has worked hard all of his life, and he killed more rats and mice on this farm than he could even begin to count.  For most of his life, he spent the majority of his time outdoors and only came in the farm house on rare occasions when the temperature was subzero.  He understands that the world doesn’t owe him anything, and he has willingly sacrificed his own safety for the good of the farm.

Things seem to have gotten tougher for Tom these last three years.  There are new cats in the house now, and although they do go outdoors and hunt (except for Emily whom he thinks is a snowflake), they have not been very welcoming to him.  Tom doesn’t like to ask for help, please understand, but last year when he returned from a tour of duty thin and in poor health, he needed to start coming into the farm house at night.  The only thanks he got for his sacrifice was a punch in the nose every time he walked past Pasquale.  Then this year in the summer, Tom returned from his last tour of duty mortally wounded.  Tom doesn’t remember exactly what happened; all he remembers is the pain, the hunger, and the fear.  When he finally made it back to the farm house after a couple of weeks, Jane looked at him and said, “Oh, my God!”  There was talk of coyotes, and Jane tended to his wounds.  He needed to recuperate in the farm house for a couple of weeks after that.

At first things were better in the farm house after Tom came home.  Pasquale has actually been kind to him and now shows respect and trust by touching noses; however, they’ll never be the kind of buddies that curl up and sleep together.  Secondo, however, has been unbearable since the election and now smacks Tom across the face every chance he gets, calling him a racist xenophobic misogynist.  Tom isn’t against undocumented cats or cats of other colors or women cats; he just feels like he and other cats are being left behind in America, and that’s why he voted for Trump.

There was a time when a cat could expect an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work.  Now it seems like he’s working harder than ever and getting less and less in return.  More and more younger cats like Pasquale, Secondo, and Emily are expecting a food handout and giving little or nothing in return.  It hurts Tom’s pride to ask for help, even something as small as sleeping indoors at night, but as long as there is life in his body, he will continue to hunt and try to earn his keep on the farm.   Tom worries about his future:  is he going to be able to rely on this younger generation to make sure he’s taken care of when he can no longer pay his way?

Tom loves Jane and he knows that he’s secretly her favorite.

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This is Emily.  She is the older cousin to Pasquale and Secondo and born the same year.  She voted for Hillary Clinton.

Emily believes that the future of America depended on Hillary being elected, and now she is very concerned that the hard work of previous generations will be undone.  Emily sees signs that the country is once again sinking into racism, bigotry, and sexism.  Emily is intelligent and educated and is absolutely stunned that Hillary lost the election.  She knows in her heart that the real reason that Hillary lost the election was because of the leaked emails, and she refuses to accept that Donald Trump will be her president.  Emily approves of the protests that occurred after the election and believes that it’s justified to commit acts of violence and to take extreme actions to raise awareness of the reprehensible behavior of Trump and his supporters.  Emily also believes that if everyone were as intelligent as she is, then Trump would have had no chance of being elected.

Emily  takes pride in being progressive and tolerant.  She is pro-choice and sniffs that no one without a vagina should be able to tell her what to do about an unplanned pregnancy. She believes that there is no scientific evidence that a fetus is a human being, and categorizes all so-called “Christians” or people of conscience who are opposed to abortion as being religious zealots.   However, she’s also in favor of gun control and assisted suicide, and she fails to see the irony in this.  Emily knows that she is not prejudiced because she proved that when she voted for Obama.  She considers the behavior of Pasquale and Buddy to be deplorable, and she feels a sense of moral superiority to them and the other riff raff on the farm that she assumes voted for Trump.  But, she asks that you please don’t mistake this for intolerance.  Emily feels a sense of solidarity with the less fortunate cats on the farm that she watches through the window. Yes, she’s afraid to go outside, but she’s killed three mice in the farmhouse this month, so she feels she can relate to their lives, and she knows exactly what they need and want.

Emily knows that it wasn’t Obama’s fault that he never put forward an economic plan that would break the cycle of poverty and government dependence; it was the Republicans in Congress that stymied all of his great initiatives.  She is opposed to voting laws that require documentation because she feels that this is discriminatory.  Of course, if undocumented immigrants were allowed to vote, she’s certain that they would have voted for Hillary because Emily is confident that she knows what is best for everyone and that everyone thinks the way that she does.

Emily loves Jane, and she knows that she’s secretly Jane’s favorite.

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This is Pasquale.  He voted for Gary Johnson.

Pasquale feels somewhat removed from all the political bickering that’s been going on amongst the other cats on the farm.  He was disgusted with both the Republican and the Democrat candidates for the presidency.  This makes him clearly superior to the other cats, and when he sees them, he will swat them.

Pasquale is a Libertarian.  He believes in eliminating the income tax and replacing it with a national sales tax.  He thinks the government should stay out of a cat’s personal and private matters.  He is anti-abortion, but he would not go so far as identifying himself as “pro-life” because he’s uncomfortable with overturning Roe v. Wade.  He is in favor of civil unions for same sex couples but was uncomfortable with the SCOTUS decision now called the “Marriage Equality Act”.   Pasquale is concerned that the separation of church and state as defined in the First Amendment is under attack and that, among other things, pastors of churches will be forced to perform same-sex marriages.

Even though Pasquale has tried hard not to take sides in the Trump v. Clinton battle, he does feel that Clinton’s supporters are being ridiculous in their assertion that the Electoral College is antiquated, and he scoffs at the idea of throwing it out.  If there were no Electoral College, the most populated areas, or roughly 3% of U.S. counties, would determine the national election results.  Pasquale is aware that nearly 1 in 20 people in this country live in the New York City metropolitan area, and as a country cat, he wonders if urban dwellers have a clue about the lifestyle, the concerns, and the values of country cats.  He read an article about Trump in the Washington Post that claimed that Trump won because people living in rural areas are uneducated, racist, and sexist; frankly, Pasquale was appalled by this level of bigotry against country cats by city dwellers that supposedly are so much smarter and more tolerant than him.

Pasquale is a bully, so Emily incorrectly assumed that he voted for Trump.  Pasquale used to beat on Tom, but lately he feels sorry for Tom, and grudgingly admits that he has a lot of respect for him.  He would never, of course, allow Tom to sleep on the bed with the humans.  They touch noses, but Tom must sleep downstairs.

Pasquale loves Jane, and he knows that he must secretly be her favorite.

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This is Secondo.  He voted for Clinton.

Secondo is Pasquale’s brother from the same litter, but everyone knows that they have different fathers.  Secondo is still a student and has a reputation for being a free spirit and a party animal.  He has been photographed wearing women’s lingerie, and it’s also widely known that he once engaged in an intimate relationship with a dog. 

Secondo is registered as an Independent because he doesn’t want to be tied down to the ideology of either political party.  He chooses a candidate based on his conscience.  Secondo has a “live and let live” approach to life, and he does not believe that there are any moral absolutes.  He does, however, believe that there should be online registries for people who abuse animals and that animals should be granted the same legal rights as people, with the exception of unborn babies.  Secondo is pro-choice and believes that unborn babies are not people and as such they are not entitled to any legal protections.

Secondo wanted Bernie Sanders to be the next president.  He liked his ideas of free college education for all.  Secondo also liked his ideas about taxing the rich to give to the poor and believes that the root cause for why so many Americans are struggling economically is that the rich aren’t paying their fair share of taxes.  Secondo heard many cats accusing Bernie of being a Socialist; Secondo asks, “Is socialism such a bad thing?”  Secondo also supported Bernie’s policy on immigration and his foreign policy.

Secondo couldn’t vote in the primary because he’s registered as an independent.  He was at first reluctant to shift his support to Hillary, but now that she has lost the election, he has been sneaking out of the house during the day to participate in anti-Trump protests.  He carries a handmade sign that reads, “Not my president!”  Emily secretly approves although she considers herself to be more mature and wiser than Secondo.  The two of them sleep next to each other on the bed sometimes, but not after some jockeying for dominance as each tries to hold down and bathe the other before settling in with their paws wrapped around each other.  Secondo has bad dreams that Donald Trump is deporting him to Italy.

Secondo loves Jane, and he knows that he must secretly be her favorite.

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This is Ralph.  He could not vote in the election because he is undocumented.

Ralph is a barn cat, but he is very social and tame.  He works hard all day long, catching as many mice and rats as he can.  He enjoys the work and is grateful for having the opportunity to work and provide for the farm.  In return he enjoys his cat food at night with the other barn cats.

Ralph is deeply religious and knows that it’s only by the grace of God that he has escaped the death of other cats that he has seen all too often in the jaws of the coyote.  Ralph is unapologetically pro-life having been raised by a single mother who chose life for him and never complained or regretted her decision.  She taught him the values of faith, family, love, and gratitude.

When the temperature is extremely cold, Ralph is scooped up by Jane and carried into the farmhouse.  Ralph tries to fit in, but the farmhouse is foreign to a cat that was raised in the barn.  He was unfamiliar with their litter box custom and thought it would be rude for him to urinate in the same spot as the others, so he peed in the corner.  Then Emily started shrieking something about “sexual harassment”, and the next thing he knew, he was on probation.  Now Pasquale and Secondo are bullying him, and Tom does nothing about it.

Ralph and Tom were born the same year and have known each other nearly all their lives.  Tom has worked side by side with Ralph and has a lot of respect for him.  They wouldn’t call each other friends, but the last thing Tom would like to see happen is for a decent, hard-working cat like Ralph to be deported.

Ralph loves Jane.  He likes to daydream that he’s secretly her favorite.

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This is Buddy.  She voted for Donald Trump.

Buddy was in the farmhouse for a good year before all these brown tabby cats appeared, and something needs to be done to stop this flood of cats!  It used to be just her and a senile old lady cat with plenty of cat food for all. Now there are cats everywhere.  She guards the food bowl and kicks ass when she needs to.  [Editor’s note:  Although Buddy considers herself a house native, she is actually only one generation removed from the barn.]

The other cats gather and speak that barn cat language that Buddy doesn’t understand.  When they laugh, she’s certain they’re making fun of her.  She agrees with Mr. Trump that we need to build a wall; how is she supposed to know the difference between the good brown tabbies and the ones that are plotting against her?  Buddy will smack the crap of any cat that disagrees with her and point out what a nansy pansy schoolgirl they are if their feelings are hurt.  These Clinton supporters need to get over it and accept that they lost.  Losers!

Buddy doesn’t like Jane, but she thinks that she must be Jane’s favorite.

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Epilogue

I would be remiss if I failed to give an update on some life-changing events that have affected Ralph since I first started to write this piece.  Ralph was diagnosed with feline diabetes in December which could have been life-ending for a barn cat.  Instead, Ralph has been sponsored by my mother and now possesses a green card.  I am giving him his insulin shots twice a day, and he is now living exclusively as an indoor cat at my mother’s house.  Ralph has never been happier in his life, and this ending is beyond his wildest dreams.    Tom spent several days looking for Ralph and thought he was eaten by a coyote, but now he is relieved to smell Ralph on my clothes.  The other cats assume Ralph has been deported.

September

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When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things.
At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known.
So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
– 1 Corinthians 13:11-13.

And the seasons they go ‘round and ‘round
And the painted ponies go up and down.
We’re captive on the carousel of time.
We can’t return we can only look behind from where we came
And go ‘round and ‘round and ‘round in the circle game.
– Joni Mitchell

There is an appointed time for everything,
and a time for every affair under the heavens.
A time to give birth, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to uproot the plant.
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to tear down, and a time to build.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance.
A time to scatter stones, and a time to gather them;
a time to embrace, and a time to be far from embraces.
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away.
A time to rend, and a time to sew;
a time to be silent, and a time to speak.
A time to love, and a time to hate;
a time of war, and a time of peace.

– Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

September is beautiful: cool, crisp mornings, sunny days, pink and gold sunsets followed by cool, dry breezes. September has perfect weather for sleeping with the window open in a fleeting balance where neither air conditioner nor fan nor furnace is needed.
Soon the choppers will be swallowing up mature cow corn and spitting out mountains of corn silage into the dump wagon. Truckload after truckload, hour after hour, it will be dumped into the trench silos, packed firmly, and covered with air tight plastic and tires. Like the autumn leaves, the chopped corn will be transformed into something new, from fresh and green to fermented, brown, and preserved.
September is also the month of nostalgia and a sadness that the soul feels but the mind does not understand, and words cannot articulate. It’s the contrast between the summer warmth and the beginning of autumn color and shorter days which makes even ordinary moments memorable, like bittersweet splashes of color and emotion against a bland, beige canvas. A woman, a child, and a dog are silhouetted against the fading sunset in an imaginary painting. Clouds of black smoke pour from the twin towers against a cloudless blue sky.
I am a child starting kindergarten who picked out my purple first-day-of-school dress at JC Penney in the city. I am overwhelmed by excitement because the dress has a “Winnie the Pooh” tag sewn in. Now I’m in second grade wearing my sister’s hand-me-down polyester pantsuit. My mother had my hair cut too short, and my classmates make fun of me and say I look like a boy. I’m the sixth grader who hauled a clear plastic suitcase full of paperbacks into school on the first day. I’m the middle school student in high heels and jeans, and the freshman in high school crying in the car at the end of the first day of school. I think that was yesterday morning, but suddenly I’m in my thirties, sitting on the sofa in a house that I own, nursing my six-week old infant son as the school bus goes past, and I start to weep thinking about his first day of kindergarten. The next day, I’m living in a different house which I own, and it really is my son’s first day of kindergarten. With great effort, I’m all smiles when the bus stops; he never sees the tears filling my eyes when the bus pulls away.
I am three years old, my father is driving us to the Springfield fair, and it starts to pour. He pulls into the driveway of a house to turn around and head back home, and I innocently ask, “Is this the Springfield fair?” I’m four years old at the fair, walking through an exhibit building with my family behind me, except I turn around and realize I am alone. I see that they have stopped to look at an exhibit, and no one has noticed that I am gone. I run back to them, and it seems like hundreds of feet. We do not ever go the midway, and we have no interest in rides. My father likes to walk through the cow barns and listen to demonstrations of Farfisa organs, and I think it’s boring. We buy salt water taffy.
Now I’m a teenager playing hooky from school to go to the fair. My father is at my side; I do not know that he will be dead in two months. I’m wearing a leather-fringed western jacket. We stop to listen to a country star practicing her fiddle on the back of the stage. I do not know her name or the name of the song she is playing, but I can still hear it in my head. I have started to enjoy looking at cows and Ginsu knife demonstrations. We have no interest in the midway. We buy salt water taffy to take home.
I’m in my mid-thirties and go to the fair with my boyfriend. It’s raining, but we like it because there are no crowds. I bump into a client from the veterinary hospital and her much younger boyfriend. I’m hoping that she doesn’t recognize me out of uniform and wearing a hooded rain coat, but she spots me instantly. We are in the midway – my boyfriend likes it. I like the cow barns, but he squeezes his nose shut and gags.
I’m in my early forties at the fair with my young son. He is only interested in the midway and is impatient with the cow barns. The rides are expensive, and when we run out of tickets he tries to convince me to spend $20 for more. Now he’s twelve years old and we’re at the fair with my new husband. A midway carny has just scammed my son out of a Pikachu doll that we thought he was going to win, and he is crestfallen. I start to tear up because I feel so bad for him. My husband is furious with both of us; the night is ruined.
I’m at the fair with my teenager. The midway rides started to make his stomach churn a few years ago. He eats corn dogs, and I have pizza fritta. He wants to look at the cows and the exhibits. We have a blast………….
**********************************************************************************
The trees feel the difference already, even though it’s only early September. Glimpses of red, yellow, and gold are now interspersed with the dark, mature greens of late summer which in turn replaced the light yellow-greens of spring’s new leaves.
I am like those trees, the dark brown hair of childhood and the raven hair of my youth has long ago been replaced by salt and pepper; now it is rapidly becoming snow white. My life has entered the autumn phase – not yet winter, but definitely past spring or summer. I look in the mirror and still see a remnant of the woman I used to be. The face is still mine, and it’s still relatively youthful and wrinkle-free. But now that my grandmother’s wooden vanity stand with the affixed mirror is serving as my desk, I’m constantly reminded that all physical resemblance to my youthful self ends there. The neck beneath the face has a grossly-enlarged thyroid which I have been assured is non-cancerous and which stubbornly refuses to shrink regardless of how consistent I am with my thyroid pills. I see the thirty pounds that I have gained since last November all around my abdomen, which resulted in my inability to button my pants and the need to purchase a new wardrobe not just once, but twice in the past year. I see the flabby arms and the loss of muscle tone that comes with age.
I will not pretend that my change in appearance doesn’t bother me. I dread bumping into people who knew me as a young woman because I can see in their eyes what they are thinking: “Wow, did she get fat!” But I do thank God that I am not the vain creature that I was 30 years ago when I was 5’8”, 135 pounds, and I looked like a movie star because this would have destroyed her. This three decades older version of Jane is starting to make peace with her appearance – not at peace yet, but getting there. Although it’s harder to exercise with all the extra weight, older and wiser Jane still goes to the gym. She goes for walks with her coworkers during break times and with her son after work. She signed up for tennis lessons and power yoga class. She dances the Cha Cha and the merengue when no one is looking. She eats good and healthy food in moderation.
The white hair is “pretty radical”, and when I let my hair down, I consider it to be nearly as stunningly beautiful as the longer raven hair of thirty years ago. I earned this hair. My body may show the ravages of the stress and hell that I have been through, but I’ve earned this body, too. On days when I’m impatient to be well and to be a healthy weight and feel discouraged about my body, I try to remember that the only thing that I will have forever is my soul. And now it is past my bedtime on a cool September night, and I will dream of falling leaves and sunsets. Good night.

Family Part 3: It’s a Dog’s Life and Death

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One day, we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ. Paradise is open to all of God’s creatures.

  • Pope Francis

When you see me fly away without you

Shadow on the things you know

Feathers fall around you

And show you the way to go

  • Neil Young

 

Ain’t but three things in this world that’s worth a solitary dime. 

But old dogs, and children, and watermelon wine.

  • Tom T. Hall

Last year was a year of pet loss.  I had to put my 20-plus year old cat ‘RentaKitty’ to sleep in April.  She was a great cat, a tough old broad who could tell a story or two, and she had outlasted a husband, several moves, three cars, and two career changes.  My son had known her from birth, and it was very sad for both of us when we had to say goodbye.  Then over the summer I lost the last three hens that had moved with us to the farm when I remarried, as well as a rooster and a rabbit that had both been abandoned before we took them in.  It was sad.  I shed tears.  I let go.

In September my dog of twelve years became ill.  She had seemed “off” for a day or two, nothing I was too concerned about, and then she was suddenly at death’s door.  My husband and I carried her semi-comatose body into a clinic where I do some relief veterinary work.  I ran some blood work and took x-rays.  She had an astronomical white blood cell count, an enlarged heart, fluid in her chest cavity, kidney failure, and a visible tumor in her abdomen.

I knew it was terminal.  I asked the staff to help put an IV catheter into her so that I could take her home and euthanize her.  My husband demanded, “You’re a veterinarian; can’t you fix her?”  I relented and agreed that we would give her a chance.  I hooked her up to IV fluids at home and set up a hospital pen in our kitchen.  I gave her massive doses of antibiotics and corticosteroids… and she rallied!  By morning she was vastly improved.  She continued on fluids for a couple of days and on antibiotics for two more weeks.

We had three fantastic weeks with her when she acted like her old self.  I knew it was only a temporary reprieve.  I knew in my heart that she would be gone by Thanksgiving.  I cherished every moment and took time to show her how much she was loved.

And then in October she crashed and burned.  I received a panicked message from my son that she was “really bad.”  I excused myself from the conference call with the USDA that we were on at work, and I headed home.  She was flat out on the floor.  My son and I lifted her onto her bed, I started treatment to make her more comfortable, and I drew a blood sample to access her organ function.    Maybe she would rally again?  I drove the sample to where I could meet a colleague who could run it at his clinic.  When I arrived, my husband called.  She was dead.

I had learned from all the people and pets that I have loved and lost that life goes on.  I got up and went to work the next day.  I cried all the way there.  I put on my big girl pants and did my job.  I cried all the way home.  When I buried her, I got out my guitar and tried to sing her an old Neil Young song, “Birds,” but I could not stop crying long enough to finish it.  It was milking time, and the skidsteer was darting in and out of the barn, cleaning the walkways while the cows were in the parlor.  The neighbor pulled in with his pickup truck, stuck his hand out the window and yelled, “Hi, Jane!” while I was standing there holding the guitar.  The cows got milked.  The chickens and ducks got locked up.  Dinner was cooked.  The cats were fed.  Life goes on.

The next day I cried all the way to work and all the way home, and the day after that, and so it went for weeks.  Although I can now get through most days without crying, I have shed more tears for her than anyone I have ever lost, more tears than I shed for my maternal grandparents who were the most powerful positive influences in my life and who formed the rock that held my family together.  I have shed more tears for the dog than I have for lost friends, mentors, my father, relationships that ended badly, and all the unrequited loves of my youth put together.

Then it reached a point where I had to look at my grief and ask myself, “What the hell is wrong with you?” I wasn’t a person who talked about my dog all day long or covered my desk at work with photos of my pets.  I have a son, after all, and my pets are not children (although I named one of my cats “Secondo” in jest).   Yes, I loved my dog; however, I don’t think that veterinarians love their pets any more or less than anyone else.  Obviously we love animals, but so do most people in the world.  What sets us apart is veterinarians are scientists who happen to like animals more than we like people.  And then I realized why I was grieving so deeply:  she was my last connection to so many parts of my life that have been lost.

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I was in private practice when we found each other twelve years ago.  It was mid-January, and overnight it had reached the coldest temperature of that winter, -15 degrees  F.  A puppy had been brought in to veterinary hospital where I was working.  She had been abandoned outdoors in a cardboard box at a fuel oil company, and a worker had found her in the morning.  Her right hind leg had frozen solid.  The support staff was trying to thaw out her leg in a pail of lukewarm water.  She looked at me.  I looked at her.  She was an abandoned animal with a major medical problem, and if we notified animal control they would issue a euthanasia order.

Euthanasia is a hard fact of veterinary practice, and I estimate that I have euthanized well over a thousand animals in the past twenty-two years.  Any veterinarian will tell you that occasionally there was an animal that they simply could not euthanize, and they ended up adopting it.  For whatever reason, this puppy was my one in a thousand that I could not euthanize.  I knew I couldn’t save her leg, but some unreasonable part of me wanted to try.  I thought that if I could save her leg, I could find a good home for her.

I took her home and told my then four-year old son that we weren’t keeping her and that we were going to take care of her until she was all better and could go to a new home.  My son’s response was, “Let’s name her CarCar.” (He was going through a Woody Guthrie phase at the time).

Of course I couldn’t save her leg and I ended up amputating it.  I already had a dog and wasn’t looking for another one; in fact, I already had another three-legged dog.  It’s strange how God works sometimes.

Those were happy times.  All of my prior dogs I had adopted as adults from dog pounds, and this was the first time that I had the pleasure of raising and training a puppy.  My son had a playmate.  She loved to run through the house, squeaking her ball in her mouth, while my son chased her and squealed with joyful laughter, and my older three-legged dog barked along.

My son was still a sleepwalker back then, and I would frequently encounter “zombie baby” in the hallway in the middle of the night.  He turned five and started kindergarten, and was still sleep walking and unable to sleep through the night.  Over Christmas break we tried two new things that were life changing for my son and his sleep patterns:  the first was melatonin; the second was putting CarCar in his room at bed time.  Suddenly my son could sleep through the night, and as restless a sleeper as he is and was, CarCar never got impatient with him, never nipping or yelping when he accidentally kicked her in his sleep.

My grandmother was still alive, and I would take Carcar next door every day to visit.  My grandmother adored her.  The two of them would hang out on the couch together all day while I was working.  If for some reason I took Carcar to work, then Grandma would ask my mother, “Where is the dog with the big head who belongs here?’  After my grandmother died, Carcar would sleep with one of her bathrobes every night and clutch it like a pillow.  I buried her with that bathrobe.

In the fall of 2007 I left private practice to teach full-time in a veterinary technology program.  I needed a live patient for students to demonstrate auscultating heart rates and taking femoral pulses on for a lab practical.  Once again my dog astonished me with her patience, never objecting no matter how long the student took or how clumsy they were.  She diligently worked for seven years of lab practicals with approximately 150 students.  I knew at the time that I would never be able to replace her.

Life changed.  I met my husband, we married, and we all moved to the farm.  CarCar now had her own sofa to sleep on in the master bedroom. Her three-legged companion had died in 2007, but she still had RentaKitty to keep her company.  She no longer went to see Grandma on a daily basis.  I wondered if she ever got lonely.

In the summer of 2013, we took in three kittens that were born on the farm.  One of them, “Secondo”, started to regularly nurse on CarCar.  The two of them would sleep together, and we would hear him nursing and purring all night long.  It was bizarre.  CarCar never seemed to notice or care.  Secondo kept up this aberrant behavior for two years, until CarCar died.

***************************************************

There’s a boulder over CarCar’s grave.  I siton it sometimes and talk to her, but not for very long because I start weeping.  I realize now why her loss has been so hard on me.

She was my last connection to my last full-time job that I held in private practice.  It was there that I amputated her leg, the single most emotionally and technically challenging surgery I have ever performed.  I had the privilege of being a large animal veterinarian for the first several years of practice, but small animal practice for me was like a dark jungle interspersed with quick sand, the stuff of nightmares.  I carried the weight of all my perceived failures:  the surgeries that had not gone well; my bumbling social skills which led to poor client relations and client dissatisfaction; the diagnoses I missed due to lack of experience or unavailability of the proper diagnostic equipment; the patients who died or whose condition worsened under my care; the crazy cat lady who made a complaint against my veterinary license.

There are veterinarians who thrive in companion animal practice, but it left me feeling traumatized; I wanted perfection, but the practice of medicine is not perfect. I couldn’t keep things in perspective, that 95% of the clients are decent people and most of the time we do more good than we do harm when we try to help.  In school a 95% was an ‘A’; in private practice all I could focus on was the 5%.  But in my saddest, darkest moments, when it seemed like the world was against me, I had my CarCar, my living example that there were at least one or two things that I had done well in practice, and maybe I wasn’t the horrible, mean, dishonest criminal that the crazy cat lady had portrayed me as.

Private practice was also a place where it is possible to adopt a new puppy and take her to work with you every day while you are training her.  These days I am gone 12 hours a day and work at a job where no pets are allowed.  CarCar was a once-in-a-lifetime dog, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready to have another; but even if I wanted another dog, I no longer have the lifestyle for being a good dog owner.

She was my connection to the house that my son and I lived in before I was remarried.  It was a big, quirky, rambling, workman’s house, built into a hill.  The carpet was the same color as the Jungle Room at Graceland.  There was ugly paneling in four rooms, unfinished floors, plumbing and electrical problems, and crumbling stairs.  Slowly I started to make improvements.  I saw the potential for what it could look like if I ever had enough money to finish the renovations.  My son and I lived there with CarCar and RentaKitty.  We were happy.  I loved the house.  I still own the house, but someone else is renting it.  They don’t love the house.  The house doesn’t feel the same now.  Everything has changed.  I miss the days when I lived there and I was happy.

CarCar is intertwined with my memories of former students and the teaching career that I left behind when I went to work for the government.  And, of course, CarCar was my last connection to my grandmother.  I believe that I am grieving for Grandma when I grieve for CarCar, and that’s wht this loss is still so raw for me seven months later.  Grandma was love.  CarCar was love.  I picture them together in heaven:  Grandma is sitting on the couch with CarCar’s head resting in her lap while Grandma strokes her.  Or Grandma sits on the couch and throws the squeaky ball for CarCar to fetch.  CarCar could no longer hold her squeaky ball in her mouth the last couple of years of her life, but heaven is a perfect place.  She probably got her leg back.  They are both happy.  It makes me smile even though I am weeping.

Family Part 2: Socks

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Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glint on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.

– Mary Elizabeth Frye

Whenever we encounter another person in love, we learn something new about God.

-Pope Francis

 

I am sorting through my sock drawer on a rainy Sunday morning.  I need to get rid of them and replace them with my new compression socks, but I just can’t seem to place them in the bag for Goodwill,  Not the trouser socks and peds that I don’t really care about, they are the first to go.  The wonderfully comfortable gold toe socks from JC Penney that I received as a Christmas present from a Secret Santa 5 years ago are harder to put away.  But hardest of all are the fleece socks that were my grandmother’s:  solid colors, stripes, Christmas themes, and a plain turquoise pair with side seams on the foot which I call my “elf socks.”

My grandmother had lived to be almost 103, and she died at home. For about the last three years of her life, she became uncooperative about taking her bath and started to need much physical assistance to get in and out of the shower. Once a week (or more if she had an “accident”) I would help my mother get Grandma into the bath, and I would bathe her.  Grandma would yell out things such as “What are you doing to me?”, or “You’re killing me!”, or my mother’s favorite, “Well shit on you!”.  I’d laugh, and she’d scowl.  Mom would help me get her out of the bath, and once she was seated, I would dry her off and rub Nivea lotion on her legs, back, and ankles to prevent pressure sores.  I’d sign Italian opera to her, and she;d smile.  I’d powder her toes and her coulu with Desiten powder, then I’d put her into a soft robe.  I’d towel-dry and comb her hair and leave a small towel around her shoulders because she didn’t like water on her neck.  The I would ease those fleece socks onto her feet, followed by her pink slippers.  There was always a little adjusting that she needed to do – I never could quite get those socks the way she wanted them – and then I would grab her walker and help her get back to the living room.  I’d trim her finger nails and give her a kiss, and she would say, “Thank you.”

These are the memories that come back to me as I hold the socks.  I also have a dress and a shirt of hers that will never fit me but which bring back such vivid memories that I leave them on hangers in my closet.  I have scarves that smell of her Alberto VO5 gray hair dressing, the kind that looks like purple toothpaste and smells like Grandma.

***************

In January 2012, I had been having trouble with shortness of breath, especially when i climbed stairs.  I had chalked it up to weight gain and being out of shape.  Then one day I was attempting to climb the stairs at the college to get to my office when suddenly I had to sit down with a sharp pain in my chest and tingling in my arms.  I left work and went to my mother’s house to rest, but my brother was there, and he drove me to the emergency room.  I was hooked up to an ECG, and blood was drawn.  I had an elevated white blood cell count and a subtle change on my ECG.  After a stress test and workup by a cardiologist, it was confirmed that I had a healthy heart.  I did, however, have a virus that was irritating my heart muscle.  I was told that whenever we catch a virus, such as the flu, and it causes muscle aches and pains, it also has the same effect on the heart.  Most of the time (95%) we never notice, but sometimes we become symptomatic as I was.  I was scared and tired.  I had seen the movie Beaches for goodness sake, and the Barbara Hershey character certainly wasn’t okay after her heart caught a virus!

But I needn’t have worried because my heart was (and is) healthy.  I just now have an annoying arrhythmia that is not serious.

One Sunday in March of this year, I started to have some chest discomfort; it wasn’t pain, just an uneasy, uncomfortable feeling.  I put a stethoscope to my chest and auscultated an arrhythmia.  My husband drove me to the emergency room, and I was given nitroglycerin and aspirin and hooked up to an ECG.  I had a mild tachyarrhythmia with occasional premature ventricular complexes.  In other words, my heart was beating fast, and part of my heart was conducting an electrical signal before the muscle had enough time to relax from the last contraction, so I was “skipping” beats.  After two nights of observation and a nuclear stress test, my heart was declared healthy, and I was discharged on a beta-blocker. The medication slowed down my heart rate, and the irregular rhythm became less frequent.

However, while I was on the beta-blocker, I started to have pitting edema in my legs, and it got so bad that I could no longer wear regular shoes.  The cardiologist took me off the medication and ordered a vascular test.  I figured that it was just a formality.  I work out three times a week at Curves, and I have individual pilates instruction on Saturdays,  I was walking two miles after work every day until my legs got so swollen that it was too difficult.  In other words, I considered myself to be healthy and reasonably fit, even with the 50 extra hypothyroid and menopause pounds that I carry around.

The cardiologist told me he had good news and bad news about the vascular test.  My superficial veins are fine – Yes! No varicose veins for me.  However, I have deep venous insufficiency.  It will progress, and once it does, it will be difficult to control,  I need to purchase 30- 40 mm Hg compression socks and wear them daily.

For now, I’m fairly asymptomatic.  The edema has resolved, and I’ve been able to wear my dress shoes twice this week,  I’m wearing old-man compression socks, those “sexy” kind that reach below the knee and make me feel like an old woman in shorts, skirts, or dresses.  The socks are hideous.  I wonder what happened to that young, gorgeous woman I used to be, when I still had a thyroid that worked, and I could eat and wear whatever I wanted.

*********************’

Those socks, grandma’s socks, are bring me to tears. I cannot let go.  I pick up the pair of elf socks and slip them back into my dresser.  I will wear them to bed in the winter time.  I call my mother and ask her if she will take them – and wear them,  She says she will.  I now have two bags, one for Goodwill and one for my mother.  I take a deep breath, and I let go.

Transitions part 4: Is it all worth it?

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It’s now been over 6 months since I started a new, better job which pays me $27K more annually, or still substantially less than I’d make in private practice.  I finally dissected my paycheck:

I only take home an additional $170 per week; yes, a higher tax bracket means more money is withheld.  This is enough to cover the gas for my 84 mile commute.  Unfortunately it’s not enough to cover the increased cost of automobile maintenance.  So yes, my husband can gloat that I’m driving further for less money.

The payroll deduction for our family medical, dental, and eye plan is identical to the deductiion for my old insurance, and the coverage is nearly identical; some services have higher co-pays, some have lower.  The only downside is that because the plan is based out-of-state, it becomes more complicated to reimbursed for some services, depending on whether or not the provider is consider to be in- or out-of network.

So what have I gained?  First of all, at my old job the total contribution to my pension was 2% of my pay.  However, I had to contribute 3% of my pay to retirees’ medical and pension benefits because the account was underfunded.  After 7 1/2 years at my former job, I had accumulated slightly more than a whopping $7K in my pension fund, or roughly enough for 2.5 months of living expenses.  At my current job, the deduction for my pension fund is 5.75%.  In addition, 8% of my pre-tax income is placed into a deferred compensation plan.  In short, 13.75% of my pay is set aside and invested so that in 20 years I may actually be able to retire.  Yes, money is tight for the moment, but it is a trade-off.  Since my former retirement plan consisted of work-until-I-die, I consider this a vast improvement.

The biggest gain for me has been peace of mind.  Despite all the struggles in our family life – the sorrow of facing my son’s mental illness; the failed relationship between my husband and my son; our marriage’s limping along on battery power; the tachyarrhythmia that landed me in the hospital for 3 days in March; the Lyme disease I contracted in May – leaving the old job removed layers upon layers of stress from my life.  When I go home at night, my work is done.  I no longer need to stay up until 1:00 or 2:00 AM correcting papers, correcting exams, writing lecture notes, writing PowerPoints, writing exams, and checking my endless emails.  There are two great fallacies that I have heard expressed about teaching:

  1. You only have to work six hours a day.  Perhaps that meant that I only had to work 6 hours at a time with those 6 hour chunks falling between breakfast, lunch, dinner, and bedtime?
  2. You get the whole summer off.  I’m not sure what “off” means.  I do know that every year on the day after Commencement exercises, I refused to do any work at all and gave myself a day off.  I do know that the work was less frenetic for most of the summer.  However, I also know it was rare for me to not have to spend a day in the office or visiting clinical locations, and my absence only occurred if I was physically incapacitated.  I also know that during our “breaks” I would take additional college courses on pedagogy to help me become a better teacher; so while I was instructing 3 credits of coursework, I was concurrently completing 3 credits of graduate-level coursework.

I was damn good at what I did.  There are many failures of the higher education system in preparing our young people for gainful employment, but if you came to me and you were willing to work hard and accept responsibility for learning your skills, I could nearly guarantee that you would not only graduate with a piece of paper, but far more importantly, you would pass a national certification examination to actually be able to be employed in your chosen field.

You see, the best part about teaching is teaching.  It’s everything that goes along with it that sucks.  I had to complete self-studies, self-evaluations, syllabi revisions, curriculum mapping, curriculum reviews, interim reports, accreditation reports, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.  For some reason when we accept a job for chump change, we devote an exorbitant amount of effort proving that we deserve our chump change.   I tolerated having my judgment, my integrity, and my actions questioned.  And finally I said no more.

Academia is too trying for non-super heroes like me.  There are extraordinary men and women who are able to dedicate 20 or 30 years of their lives to that effort for ridiculously low pay, but for me, there has to be some kind of reward.  I don’t need people to throw me a parade every day or pat me on the back.  I don’t need to be rich, and frankly I wouldn’t know what to do with the money if it ever came my way.  Yet I need another critic like I need another anus.

I always leave my work at my job now.  I can’t guarantee that will be the case when we have an HPAI outbreak, but for now at least, work is work, and home is home.  For the time being, that’s enough.

In Defense of Kurt Busch

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People living their lives for you on T.V. They say they’re better than you and you agree. – Jewel

The culture of selfishness and individualism that often prevails in our society is not, I repeat, not what builds up and leads to a more habitable world:  rather, it is the culture of solidarity that does so; the culture of solidarity means seeing others not as rivals or statistics, but brothers and sisters. – Pope Francis

My friends and family know that I am a serious fan of stock car racing, and reading the title of this post, they may have concluded that I have lost my mind.  Believe me, I am no fan of the Busch brothers.  I may have harbored uncharitable thoughts about them, referring to them as pasty-skinned Las Vegas vampires that need to get some sunlight for goodness sake.  I may have shouted expletives at one or the other when their aggressive driving cost one of my favorite drivers the race win.

Kurt Busch was caught up in a media controversy earlier this season, and he was suspended from NASCAR for several races.  He had been accused by his ex-girlfriend of domestic abuse.  Because of my rather low opinion of Kurt, I found this easy enough to believe.  It was Kurt Busch’s response that was unbelievable:  he accused his ex-girlfriend of being a trained assassin who had killed drug lords with knives, poison, and rifles.  I wondered aloud, “Has Kurt Busch lost his mind?  Is he schizophrenic?”

This incident came on the heels of an NFL player who had punched out his fiance in an elevator fight.  The surveillance video went viral on the internet.  Ray Rice (and yes, I had to look up his name as I’m writing this) was fired from his team (of which I am not going to bother to look up the name) and suspended from the NFL.

Domestic violence is a cancer on our society.  It’s deplorable, heart-breaking, and occurs across all socioeconomic and racial groups.  However, should every athlete who is accused of domestic violence be suspended or fired?

I remember a conversation we had at work last fall following the Ray Rice incident.  We considered if everyone at my former place of employment who had ever been involved in a domestic violence incident was automatically fired from their job.  We concluded that we would have no maintenance department.  We also agreed that deciding what punishment these men deserved was up to the courts to determine, i.e. a court of law rather than the Court of Public Opinion.

On a similar thread, a couple of years ago a weatherman on a local news station was abruptly fired.  He had been caught having an extramarital “sexting” affair.  The reason given for his firing was that his behavior was inappropriate.

I have heard the argument that it’s different when someone is on T.V. and that they must live to a higher standard.  I think that reasoning is idiotic for several reasons.  First and foremost, I simply do not believe that anyone on television is necessarily a better person than any of us who are not.  Some of us, such as newscasters, actors, and athletes, have jobs that require us to do our work on camera.  The rest of us simply do not work on camera.  If we are all held to the same standard, should your coworker who is arrested for being drunk and disorderly on Friday night be fired?  How about your coworker who is having an extramarital affair?

Secondly, do we as a society truly believe that people on TV must adhere to a higher standard?  If that was true, reality TV would have been dead in the water over twenty years ago with MTV’s “The Real World.”  I think, rather, that we enjoy living by a double standard.

To put it more succinctly, George Will has called the new entitlement “The Right to Never Be Offended.”  He said this in response to the public uproar over some comments that Phil Robertson of “Duck Dynasty” had made regarding homosexuality.  I found it ironic that the same folks who proclaim a lifestyle of “live and let live”, who are pro-gay “marriage”, pro-abortion, and overflowing with an abundance of tolerance can be profoundly intolerant of someone who disagrees with them.

Hopefully I haven’t managed to offend anyone.  I’d like to keep my job.

Family Part 1: The Mother I Thought I Was

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Welcome to Holland (Written by Emily Perl Kingsley)

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability – to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It’s like this…
When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip – to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum, the Michelangelo David, the gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting.
After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.”
“Holland?!” you say. “What do you mean, Holland?” I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.

But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to some horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place.
So you must go out and buy a new guidebook. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It’s just a different place. It’s slower paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around, and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills, Holland has tulips, Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy, and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life you will say, “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.”…………

My son and I lived alone for the first twelve years of his life.  I had thrown my husband out before my son was born because he was abusive, and I didn’t want my son to grow up in that environment.  My son does not know his father, and I have never asked for nor received a penny of child support.  We lived a quiet life.  There was no parade of men in and out of the house.  We had basic cable, but we rarely watched television other than EWTN and PBS.  We lived in a small town where we walked to church, to school, and to work.  We attended Mass regularly and prayed together.  There were times when we struggled financially, but I was proud of my ability to support us, and I paid all my bills on time.

My son was diagnosed at a relatively early age with an autism spectrum disorder.  When he started speaking clearly at three months old (his first word was “Mommy”), I thought he was brilliant.  When he was obsessed with spinning objects and started saying the word “fan” 1000+ times a day (I tracked it), I thought he had OCD.  When his pediatrician mentioned autism, I thought it couldn’t be possible, because aren’t autistic kids supposed to sit in the corner and bang their heads against the wall?  I’m ashamed of how ignorant I was.  He was enrolled in a small Catholic elementary school, and we were blessed to have teachers and staff who, with the notable exception of his fifth grade teacher, were understanding and supportive of him.  They jumped through hoops to help him be successful, and I will be forever grateful to the world’s kindest principal.

He attended social skills training and received occupational therapy in an after school program in an autism treatment center. Slowly his social skills and self-control improved, and the phone calls from irate parents and concerned school staff dissipated.  My son became an honor roll student, a cub scout, an altar boy, a basketball and a soccer player, and ran with a cross country team.  He was deeply religious and had a strong moral compass.  He learned to look people in the eye and smile, and he became a strikingly handsome young man.

When my son was in fourth grade, I met my future husband.  I knew that he and my son didn’t exactly hit it off, but I had blind faith that I was meant to be with this man and that somehow everything would work out.

I was an idiot.  My husband completely and utterly lacks the patience, understanding, and insight that raising a teenage boy with Asperger’s requires.  There was constant conflict between the two of them, mostly because of my husband’s notions of what my son should be doing and how I should be parenting him.  My son struggled through seventh and eighth grades, but with lots of support from his school, he was able to graduate with acceptable grades.

In ninth grade, my son entered a public high school, and his grades dropped without the structure and support of the Catholic school. A meeting was called, and a 504 plan for some accommodations was put in place for him.  He struggled through the year and managed to pass, but his grades were not high enough for him to be able to participate in basketball, soccer, or cross country.

Summer came.  My son was supposed to be working on our farm as part of his agricultural experience for school.  It completely unraveled by the end of the first week….my husband and his second oldest son screaming at him in the milking parlor….my son crying, depressed, feeling worthless…The tension was unbearable.

He returned to school in the fall and concurrently stopped eating properly.  At 6’3″ he weighs 150 pounds; he looks like a skeleton with skin stretched over his frame.  I beg him to eat, but he says his stomach hurts.  His grades are plummeting, so a more restrictive 504 plan is put in place at school.  He starts growing his hair longer and hiding his face.  He looks sad and withdrawn and hides in his room most of the time.  He’s indignant when I ask him if he’s using drugs, even though I know he would never do such a thing.

By Thanksgiving he has a girlfriend.  I give him an iPod for Christmas which makes it easier for him to talk to her.  I’m starting to over hear conversions where he’s chatting, happy and laughing, and I smile thinking of how more and more he seems like a neuro-typical kid.  But I’m starting to see alarming mood swings.  One night he is screaming, crying, destructive, and terrified; he admits he is suicidal.  I sleep in the spare bed in his room that night, and in the morning I arrange for counseling for him.

There continues to be ups and downs in school and in his relationship with his girlfriend.  My husband badgers him constantly about being lazy and not doing his chores.  He is now failing multiple subjects at school, except for his honors geometry class.

Then on a Friday afternoon he sends me a text message with a veiled suicide threat.  I leave work and drive him to the ER. He admits that he planned to stab himself in the chest.  They take away his clothes, his cell phone, my purse and cell phones, and put him in a room with nothing in it but a bed and metal plates covering the electrical outlets.  He’s terrified and doesn’t want to stay there.  He convinces the crisis nurse that he is okay, and they discharge him.

But he’s not okay.  His relationship with his girlfriend has soured, and he is worse than ever.  I call his pediatrician to make an appointment for him to be evaluated for medication on the advice of his counselor; after I explain to them that my son has suicidal ideation, they offer him an appointment in six weeks.  I call five other pediatricians and doctors trying to get him in sooner, and no one will take a new patient.  Finally, a psychiatrist in another county agrees to see him in seven days.

At the psychiatrist’s office, she speaks to my son alone first.  When I speak to her alone, she tells me that he needs a higher level of care and needs to be hospitalized.  I agree to take him to the ER at the children’s hospital.  We discuss all the stressors in his life:  my husband, school, girlfriend troubles.  She asks me why I stay with my husband….

On the drive to the ER, my son is begging me not to take him.  We are both in tears.  I try to reassure him that it’s a children’s hospital and will be nicer.  When we arrive, they take away his clothes and belongings and lock up my purse.  We sit in a hallway waiting for a room in the crisis unit.  He finally gets a room, and a social worker speaks with us.  He’s in luck because there’s a bed in an inpatient behavioral unit across the street.  We go back to the room and wait.  After a couple of hours, I ask the charge nurse how much longer it will be before he’s transferred.  She apologizes and tells me that the facility where they had a bed will not take our insurance. She names a couple of facilities that do take it, but theydon’t have any beds.  They will call around in the morning….

I spend my first of four nights sleeping in a recliner in a room in the crisis unit of the ER.  In the middle of the night, they need to rearrange rooms, and he gets moved.  There are three security guards patrolling the corridor for fourteen kids.  The lights are on all night long, and none of the staff bothers to lower their voices.  We pray a rosary to try to sleep.

In the morning, I ask if there’s a room, and I’m told not yet, but they’ll check again in the afternoon, etc.  We pray the entire rosary that night:  20 decades, 203 Hail Marys, 21 Our Fathers, 21 Glory Be’s, and 20 Fatima prayers.

The next day is Saturday, and there is still no bed anywhere.  I know that there is not likely to be a bed opening up on a Sunday.  I have to leave to take a shower and change my clothes.  He begs me to stay, and I leave in tears.  The hospital is an hour from my home.  When I return three hours later, he is lying in bed with his eyes squeezed shut, praying the rosary.

Another long night and another day in the ER.  A child is screaming all night long that he wants to go home.  Finally on Sunday morning they start my son on an antidepressant, the only treatment he has received yet.

The fifth day they locate a bed for him in another state.  It’s a two hour ambulance ride, and I follow in the Volvo.  We have to go through another ER and then to another crisis unit where we are interviewed by more social workers.  Finally at 10 PM he gets a room in the adolescent psychiatric unit.  I can tell he’s terrified, and he hugs me for too long.  I weep all the way home and get in around midnight.

I have missed three days at work and drive in the next day.  The hospital is miraculously only 20 minutes from my job, and visiting hours are in the evening from 6 to 8 PM.  I arrive and find him smiling, relaxed, and acting like his old self.  He’s been on antidepressants for only three days, and already it’s helped him.  Suddenly I start to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I realize that I will have him home soon.

The day before he is discharged, I have another long interview with a social worker and a psychiatrist.  Is it true that your husband is verbally abusive to him? Yes. Would your husband consider going to family therapy?  No. They make follow-up appointments for him with a psychiatrist and his counselor.  I have a meeting at his school in which they offer tutoring to help him make up all the work that he has missed.

And then he’s home again, with the mother who kicked out her first husband because he was abusive, and who is now with a second husband who is pathetically incapable of being decent to my son.

His girlfriend breaks up with him the day after he gets home.  He is still up and down, but he doesn’t feel like killing himself.  I try to offer him advice and explain that no one should control how he feels, but he is silent.  Then I read a paragraph to him about acceptance from page 449 of the 3rd edition of Alcoholic Anonymous, and somehow it strikes a chord in him:

And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing or situation — some fact of my life — unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment.

Nothing, absolutely nothing happens in God’s world by mistake. Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitudes.

Why don’t I leave?  That’s what the psychiatrist had asked me point blank.  The biggest reason is because moving is a pain in the ass.  The second reason is that my husband is not the only stressor in my son’s life, and right now the stress of moving would be greater than the stress of staying.  My son and I did leave two years ago for a couple of months.  One thing he learned from the experience was that leaving didn’t fix everything.  It was stressful to be so unsettled and to have all our possessions in limbo.

That doesn’t mean that I won;t change my mind tomorrow, next week, or next month as I frequently do.  I thought I was the mother who would do anything to protect her son including walking away from an abusive marriage.  I found out that I’m the mother that spends her time trying to smooth over the damage, and that’s the hell that I will live with every day.

Transitions part 3: The Worst Winter in Two Decades

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Take me riding in the car, car; Take me riding in the car, car;

Take me riding in the car, car; I’ll take you riding in my car.

-Woody Guthrie

I remember those first blurry days at work.  I knew that I would have a long commute every day (1 hour and 37 minutes each way to be exact), but I thought I was going to luck out.  The weather was mild, and it was shaping up to be a mild winter; I even drove my old VW bug to work one day in December.

In January it started to snow, and it didn’t stop snowing until April on Easter Sunday; honestly, I’m not sure it’s done snowing yet.  It wasn’t that snow is unexpected; it’s just that there was so much of it, and so often:  57 days of measurable precipitation between Thanksgiving and Easter.  And it was so cold.  Not just the normal winter cold where it drops below zero for a week or two in January; but rather this was bone-chilling, sub-zero, freezing, the-coldest-February-on-record cold.

I drive 84 miles each way to work, and before Daylight Savings Time I spent a significant amount of time driving in the dark.  When it’s dark and snowing, my commuting time can more than double.  I drive an old Volvo, so I’m not worried too much about getting into an accident in the snow.  Even if that were to happen, it’s unlikely I would be hurt, and the car is paid for. But there were multiple days where the snow made me late for work, sometimes by as much as 3 hours.  On those days I would stay later at night, then drive home in the dark on snow-covered roads.

The first week of February, I needed to complete 3 days of incident command level 3 training.  I was sent across town to an off-site location, and I was the only person in my department participating in that round of training.  The first day of training we were hit by a blizzard, so I left an hour early.  There was already a foot of snow on the ground.  I normally don’t see many cars, but on that morning I counted the number of cars I saw on the road on one hand, and 3 of those cars were in the ditch with either a trooper or two truck along side of them.  I questioned my sanity, and I wondered as I got close to the city if the training had been canceled.  No one had contacted me, and since it was a 3-day event, I doubted that it could be rescheduled.  Besides, it would be attended by a broad group of first-responders: troopers, police, sheriffs, firemen, paramedics, EMTs, DOT workers – all folks who were not likely to stay home because of bad weather.

Finally,  3 hours later, I arrived at my destination. The parking lot was already full of cars that had been parked there long enough to accumulate another 4″ of snow on them.  I slipped into the back of the room and took a seat.  I was an hour late, but by this time we had accumulated 18″ of snow, and I felt like I deserved a medal for getting there.  After the next segment was finished, one of the retired policemen who was leading the class walked up to me and asked, “Are you aware that this class starts at 8:00, young lady?”  It took me a moment to realize that he was serious.  I told him, yes, I was aware of what time the class started, but that I had come from a long distance, and I wouldn’t be late again.

At the end of the day, I scraped another half foot of snow off the car and headed home. There was more traffic now on the highway, and unfortunately the painted lines were not visible through the snow.  Each driver seemed to be deciding where he wanted his lane to be, and at one point I could have reached out and touched the two cars I was sandwiched between.  I questioned my sanity again.  I thought about the policeman who scolded me, and i smiled.  It took and extra hour and a half to get home.

As crazy as it may seem, I don’t mind the drive.  Where I live, people routinely try to commute through suburbia into large urban centers on roads that weren’t constructed to be major thoroughfares.  Some of those folks spend as much time in the car as I do and drive less than half the distance in stop-and-go traffic.  I live in a rural area, and my commute is mostly rural.  I like to point out that I only see one traffic light in those 84 miles until I get very close to where I work, and there’s hardly any traffic.  Best of all, I have the pleasure of driving through some of the most beautiful areas of the northeast.

One Monday morning in March, I got an early start to work.  I was smiling thinking about how blessed I was and enjoying the ride.  Daylight Savings Time had started, and I was no longer driving in the dark.  That day it wasn’t snowing, and although it was still below freezing, the sun was shining.  I was thinking how lucky I was that no one commutes in the same direction as me.  I have time to pray the Rosary on the way to work, and the Chaplet of Divine Mercy on my ride home.  The old Volvo was much better on gas than I had anticipated.  And I was going to be early for work……After I had driven about 30 miles, I realized that I had left my laptop at home.  I sighed and turned around.

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