Ingenting

Last time I visited my folks, I took my mother to the pain doctor. I gave her her space and let her go in without me. A half hour later the shellshocked doctor staggered out of the examining room, begging me to rescue him. 

My mother views doctor visits as one-way socializing. She does not listen to a word the doctor says. She just waits for him or her to take a breath as her cue to start talking again. The doctor explains that the last time my mother came in, he had given her a pain shot with specific instructions: Do not bend over or make any physical effort for 48 hours and keep a pain diary so we can see if the shot worked. He wonders why my mother had not returned after 6 weeks, as he had asked her to.

In the car on the way back, mother explains that it wasn't her fault.  When she got home, the kitchen clock  fell off the wall and landed behind the oven. Rather than wait for someone physically able to come over, she yanked the oven away from the wall and got down on all fours to retrieve the clock. Needless to say she got NO benefit from that shot. As for the diary, I could have told the good doctor that would never happen.

 

Fast forward to the current visit home. I have to take mother to a new pain doctor. (Concerned she may have driven the last one insane, I consider checking the local mental hospitals for babbling physiatrists.)  Somehow I manage to get to the pain doctor even though I am clearly going THE WRONG WAY and we would have gotten there ten minutes earlier had I only followed mother’s directions. She’s already been to this new doc once, right after COVID hit. The doctor gave her one pain injection with instructions to come back for a second one. But when mother returned, she was told it had been too long since her COVID test and she needed to get retested. That's a lot when you are 89 and the only person you allow to drive you is the yard guy who hates doing it and is never available. (Never mind that your daughter gave you the number of a service that specializes in driving old people around. They are not the yard guy.) 

After vehemently refusing my help, mother is trying to fill out forms while we wait in the examining room. The form requires a description of your pain. Mother has to circle or skip words like Dull. Sharp. Throbbing. Nervy. Burning. Cold. Nagging. Stabbing... So many words! This is stupid, mother exclaims. How can I decide? All of it. I feel all of it. It depends on the time of day. Next, she has to rate her pain from 1 to 10.  How ridiculous. Rate it against what? How do you ascribe a number to pain? Quelle connerie! (Connerie is French for bullshit).

 

Enter a handsome young male nurse. 

Nurse: Mrs. Becker, where is your pain? 

Mother: Well, it’s in my lower back

Me: (Trying to be helpful because I know how this is going to go) The gerontologist says it’s lumbago.

Mother: It’s also in my knee. And my left arm and right shoulder. And right across my clavicles. It feels like a thousand tiny bombs are exploding all over my torso.

Nurse: Mrs. Becker, can you tell us where it hurts the most?
Mother: EVERYWHERE. It hurts everywhere. (Much extraneous information follows. What’s wrong with her husband, how much better she felt 2 weeks ago, how she’s sure her COVID shot had a lot to do with it, how she has no help because her daughter lives in California and her other daughter lives in France,  how she was walking to the Safeway just last week, how spry she was three days ago...)
Me: Mother, you need to specify where it hurts the most. Otherwise all they can do is tell you to take Tylenol.
Nurse: Can you describe your pain?

Mother: Yes. It hurts.

 

The nurse looks at me. I cross my eyes, which, after years of practice, I am very good at.  He realizes it’s hopeless and gets the doc. The doc manages to cut through the avalanche of words and find out that my mother has a trigger point. She injects the trigger point with something.  I am a bad daughter. I should have asked what but at this point, it could be cortisone, Lysol, or balsamic–I don't care.  All I want is to GTF out of there before I lose what’s left of my mind.  The doctor tells me my mother is a tough lady who overdoes it and isn't a good listener. I resist asking Dr. Obvious why we are paying for a diagnosis I could have made myself. 

Then the doctor sends another handsome young guy to see us–the TENS expert. As he sticks electrodes on my mother's back, he explains the principle behind TENS. I chuckle silently through gritted teeth. I know my mother will think this is another “connerie”. There is no way in hell she is going to stick electrodes on her back in a prearranged pattern and sit still for forty minutes in the morning and forty minutes at night. Not to mention operate anything with buttons and a screen. 

 

She hates the TENS machine. This connerie feels like a large insect is crawling on her back.  The young man tell her the company will send the TENS machine, which costs $600, to her house so she can try it. She can either return it or she has the option to buy it for $25 a month.  She politely agrees but on the way home, she vents about the stupid questions, the stupid nurse, the stupid doctor, and the stupid, stupid connerie of a TENS machine. I point out that there is legit science to it and that my hospital clients use it on women in labor. No, it is a connerie and as usual, I have no idea what I’m talking about.

 

The next day, my sister calls and tells my mother that my brainiac nephew who knows everything, studies artificial intelligence, and is going to the French equivalent of Wharton, has heard of TENS. He says they use it on Olympic athletes. Mother perks up. If her genius grandson knows about it, there's a small chance it's not a connerie.

 

Monday comes and no TENS machine. Tuesday, still no TENS machine. I say nothing but decide I better call them and check on the whereabouts of the machine tomorrow. That night, I go out to dinner with a friend. When I come back, Mother is in a tizzy. Turns out the TENS machine came while I was doing errands for her on Monday. Of course she never told me and now, she has lost it. We look everywhere but deep down I know it’s hopeless. In the past two years, her house has eaten:
Two sets of car keys–at the same time

A bunch of jewelry she had hidden in her underwear drawer

A credit card

Her wedding ring

Every important paper that’s come in the mail. (Somehow solicitations from Smile Train, Doctors Without Borders, the Native American School, the Paris Jewish Museum, the DNC, Children's Hospital, and that "charming" Chuck Schumer never get lost).

Most of this stuff eventually turned up but it can take months.

 

We search everywhere for the TENS machine. And I do mean EVERYWHERE. No, mother shouts. Not upstairs. I never took it upstairs!  I look anyway. The attic room. No! Mother yells. Not the attic. I didn’t GO to the attic. I keep looking. The basement (a regular archeological site. There's no telling what you might find there.) No! Mother screams. Why would I have taken it to the basement? No, not in this drawer, that closet, the sewing basket, the medicine cabinet, or the freezer. Not behind the hutch or under the bed or in the secret compartment in the antique desk. Also not in the hanging shoe container in the coat closet where, last time she visited, and long after the car got rekeyed, my sister finally found the two missing sets of car keys under a pair of mittens.  I keep looking. My parents' caregiver looks too. Zilch. Zippo. Nada. Or, as Bergman would say with existential Swedish bitterness, ingenting.

 

Last night was garbage night. We conclude that mother inadvertently put the TENS machine, which came in a padded manila envelope, out with the recycling. Hopefully some lucky garbage man is using it on his lumbago.

Human Kindness in the Time of Corona

With all the parks closed here in Northern California, I have been taking 2-3 hour hikes on country roads. Yesterday,  I walked for two hours with Maggie, my mini schnauzer. I took photos of wildflowers and scenery, stopping twice to water the dog. Somewhere along the way, at one of the watering stops, my keys fell out of the tiny back pack I carry. I didn't realize they were gone until I got back to the car.

So here I am, locked out, the sun is going down, and I am out of cell phone range. I'm parked at the intersection of a road that hardly ever gets any traffic and a slightly busier one on which folks go zooming by every five minutes or so. I stand at the intersection and flag the first car I see. It stops! Two Mexican gentlemen get out and ask if they can help me. I give them my husband's phone number and ask them to please call him when they get in cell phone range and tell him to come save me and bring the extra set of keys. They offer to drive me but we don't want to give each other Corona so we think better of that option.

Twenty minutes later, I get nervous. The hubs never answers the phone unless he recognizes the number because we get so many junk calls. And he has a tendency to nap before dinner. I flag another car. Night is falling fast. Again, the first vehicle I flag stops. A nice older couple in a pickup. I ask them for the same favor. They have cell reception - better carrier I guess. The lady calls and texts, including a picture she takes of me. No response from the Hubs.

Then, it occurs to me to call my daughter in another city. I know the Hubs, if he's awake, will recognize her number and answer the phone. As the lady dials my daughter, the two Mexican guys pull up behind her. They were concerned about me because they could not reach my husband and came back, 30 minutes out of their way, to make sure I was OK. I thank them profusely and they drive off. The older couple calls my daughter who thankfully answers the phone and promises to keep calling her Dad. They insist on also stopping by our place and knocking on the door. (By the time they did so, the Hubs had already left.) They then called my daughter twice to make sure I was OK!

Since work is abysmally slow right now, I am about to head out and walk 3 miles up one side of that road and 3 miles back down the other side, hoping I can recognize where I watered the dog and maybe find my keys in the tall grass, wildflowers, and weeds. I am not betting on it.

While I'm annoyed with myself for being the ADD-addled twit I have always been, I can't help but be touched by the consideration and human kindness I experienced from 4 perfect strangers.

PS - Went back and retraced my footsteps, combing through the tall grass and weeds with my hiking poll. And guess what? I FOUND MY KEYS!!!

Gag Me With a Gift

T'is the season to be corny. Time for that requisite break from faith, family, and unbridled materialism, the gag gift party. It could be an office party, or hosted by a client or friend. The bottom line is, you have to bring something gift-wrapped on the outside and goofy on the inside.

One time, I got literal about the gag part. I thought of things that trigger my gag reflex and considered assembling a gift basket of marmite, pickled herring, pork rinds, red hots, and gefilte fish. Then I had a more cost-effective idea. I went to a medical supply store and bought a box of tongue depressors, timeless gag-inducing tools for medical science. Come party time, I had to explain the concept when the hapless recipient randomly picked my present from the gift pile. The laughter was polite but subdued. We copywriters can be too smart for our own good.

Occasionally, you get lucky. I found a multicolored feather boa at a thrift store and stuffed it in a  kleenex box. It went to a gay gentleman who performs and sings in drag – total chance pick on his part– and it was great watching him pull loops of rainbow feathers out like tissues.

There are many ways the gag gift thing can go awry. Like when the majority of folks take the high road and get something nice and you bring the Jefferson Beauregard Sessions Elf on the Shelf. I hate it when that happens. Sometimes, you have to pause and recognize genius. I just went to a party where a guy gift wrapped his Family Size detergent and then picked his own gift.

Anyway, I think from now on I will take the high road. As with everything in life, the high road has a downside. You could be the stiff at a party where people bring glitter condoms, edible underwear, and Donald Trump butt plugs. (I have never been to such a party but it could happen).  But all in all, the high road is safe. Don't go for too safe, though. Get quirky. I am giving ceramic garlic bakers plus a whole head of garlic which I will wrap in scads of tissue paper.

Maybe I'll put a poem on the card:
You'll never have a better spread
Than roasted garlic on your bread.
May your holidays be aromatic and rich in love.
Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Peace, Love, and Harmony.
That would be corny. Then again, 'tis the season.

Overthinking Kirtan

For weeks, my yoga studio reminded us that Jai Uttal was coming to give a special performance just for us - $30 in advance, $40 the day of the show. I did not know who Jai was, but he is a big deal in the world of yoga. A practitioner of Bhakti yoga, Mr. Uttal is an internationally known devotional singer who puts ancient mantras to a blend of folk/rock/jazz and Indian music. He also occasionally writes a secular song with English lyrics. Most would consider his sound to be world music, but his  Grammy nomination was in the New Age category.

The reminders intensified as the concert approached. I love my studio and the teachers there, and I was getting concerned that the performance wasn't selling out. I made a perfunctory attempt to ask my husband if he'd go with me. I already knew that would be a no. If you were to make a Venn diagram of our musical tastes, it would look like this:

So I decided to go solo and bought myself a ticket.

The night of the concert, I put on my leggings and a mauve indian tunic covered in Sanskrit lettering. I have no idea what it says. When clothing includes Asian writing of any sort as a decorative element, I always suspect it actually says something like "Look at this Caucasian idiot." Still, that didn't stop me from buying the tunic because, well, it's pretty, and sometimes I am a Caucasian idiot.

It was stifling in the yoga studio. They normally do hot yoga and it had been a warm day. We all sat on folding chairs, or on bolsters up front. This was to be an evening of kirtan, the call and response singing of mantras. Uttal is a wonderful musician and composer. His voice was rich and soothing but slightly weary as he was under the weather that night. Uttal was accompanied by an exquisite female singer with a crystalline soprano, and an earthy yet dainty young dancer with short hair and eloquent hands. Both women were white but dressed in bright-hued saris. In addition to the Kirtan, Uttal sang some songs, in Sanskrit and in English, sneaking in a couple of secular numbers.

I was enjoying the sing along, looking around at all the mostly anglo folks swaying and chanting when I found myself wondering. Was this cultural appropriation? There is nothing Western about Hinduism with its multi-limbed deities, elephant god, and convoluted mythology. With a change of hair and clothing, the old hippy couples, comely young yoginis and ascetically thin yoga dudes dancing in the back of the room could have passed for Mormons. Was my inner East Coast cynic resurfacing? Was this a scene from a Woody Allen movie? Or was it just my restless monkey mind harshing my mellow?

I flashed back on four years ago, when I participated in a musical project called The Vak Choir of Ordinary Voices. It was the creation of yoga teacher, Ann Dyer, who had been a jazz singer in her earlier years. She had given up jazz singing and immersed herself in Indian spiritual music. A friend of hers at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center commissioned Ann to create a performance blending her two musical influences. The piece was based the creation story of Vak, the goddess of sound and speech. Just as our mythology starts out with God declaring let there be light, Indian mythology starts out with a goddess singing let there be sound.

I learned about the difference between the Western and Indian singing styles. In the West, singing is all about projecting, making yourself heard. In the Indian tradition, you focus on how the sound vibrates internally and how different vowel sounds are felt in different parts of the body.  It takes conscious breathing, concentration, and patient, internal listening. We worked on sliding notes and on singing quarter tones. You can hear them long before you can reproduce them accurately but eventually you get there.

The Vak choir practiced quite a bit in preparation for the show. Raising my voice in unison with others was almost transcendent, and I always felt refreshed and relaxed when I went home.

A month or so before the Vak performance, I attended a talk at Ann Dyer's studio. The speaker was an expert on Hildegarde Van Bingen, a 12th century German abbess, mystic, composer, and medieval renaissance woman, if there can be such a thing. (Hildegarde was also a writer of botanical and medicinal texts and is considered the founder of scientific natural history in Germany.)  The presentation focused on her work as a musician, and after the talk, we sang Hildegarde. From shanti shanti to sanctus sanctus. Different scales and melodies. Very different gods. Same exact emotion. And I realized, it's not the religion, it's raising your voice with other humans that makes the experience spiritual.

It doesn't matter if you were raised in another tradition. It's OK if you've lost your Faith, or even if, like me, you're constitutionally incapable of Belief. You follow the music, it fills you, you sing, you sway. That's the beauty of Kirtan. I shushed the monkey mind and got back to chanting.

Ponderings

It's been three and a half years since we left the white bread enclave of Orinda California for the friendlier, funkier Oakland Hills. We landed in a two bedroom house with a panoramic view of San Francisco Bay. It's what the local parlance refers to as a two bridge view, with the Bay Bridge directly across us and the Golden Gate to the right. We are on a small ridge and you have to go down a flight of steps to reach the front door. When the landlord remodeled the place, he shored up the incline with a stone wall and built a rocky fish pond with a little waterfall. Two fish lived in the pond. One was orange and maybe 8 inches long, the other ghostly white and the size of a respectable trout. Little Red and Big Gil looked more like overgrown gold fish than fancy koi. The landlord instructed us not to feed them and indeed, they seemed to feed on nothing. I suspect they subsisted on pond scum.

That pond was trouble from the get go. The lining leaked and the rocky walls oozed water, leaving a perpetual puddle on the patio. We had to keep refilling the basin with the garden hose several times a week. Not environmentally responsible in the face of a water shortage, and a bit of a bump in the water bill, but the fish were happy.

If we're stuck with fish, I figured, lets add a dash of color to the murk and get a pond-full. So my husband bought me seven more fish for my birthday. Most were garden variety goldfish but a couple were especially fancy, white with bold orange markings and long delicate fins. Not long after we repopulated the pond, Maggie the mini schnauzer and I returned from her nightly walk and surprised a racoon gazing intently into the water, like Narcissus admiring his reflection.  He loped off as we started down the stairs, but the next day I noticed we were down a couple of fish.

One hot day, a month or so later, we were sitting on the sofa with the front and balcony doors open, trying to get a cross breeze. My husband, who was facing the yard, suddenly gestured for me to look outside. Perched on the edge of the pond was a brown hawk,  showing off his impressive wingspan. Not long after Mr. Hawk dropped by, I took inventory of the pond's inhabitants. Down two more.

Our most impressive and unexpected fish-napper was a great white heron.  Maggie and I came home from the store one afternoon to find him checking the pond for signs of life. She bolted down the stairs barking madly and the big bird flew up onto the roof where he remained for a good ten minutes before the dog's ferocious fussing finally drove him away. Post-heron, only two fish remained. It was survival of the fittest, the hardy, pond-smart, original two, Big Gil and Little Red. They hung in for several more months.

Then came the morning I ran into my neighbor taking out the trash. "I saw the craziest thing in your yard this morning," he announced. "Your motion detector light went on about 6 a.m. and when I looked out the window at your yard, there was a raccoon in the pond."  Yes, you read that right – the raccoon was literally swimming laps, back and forth, back and forth. I don't think he was trying to get his cardio on, because the red fish was gone. Only the great white guppy remained, the last of his kind.

When the next water bill came, we called the landlord. It's hard to justify wasting this much water for just one fish - not when desperate central valley farmers are draining California's aquifers  dry. The landlord gave us a choice: he could fix the pond or fill it with dirt and put some plants in. We chose option number two.

The landlord sent over his handyman, Francisco, to drain and fill the pond. "What do you want me to do with the fish?" Francisco asked. "I don't know, Francisco. You decide." I've gone fishing and I'm not that squeamish about it, although I like to eat my catch. Catch and release just seems sadistic to me. But scooping up the Old Man of the Pond with a net felt unsportsmanlike, and making him into dinner, downright unappetizing. Francisco is a country guy. I knew he'd figure something out – maybe bop Big Gil on the head and leave him out for one of the neighborhood cats. I left to buy some drought resistant succulents for our new bed.

When I came back, the pond was full of potting soil and Francisco was gone. Big Gil was still there. Francisco had placed him in solitary confinement in a white plastic bucket. Big Gil was my problem now. For two days, he refused to die. He wasn't going to sleep with the fishes, even if he was one. My cowardly response was to race past the bucket with my head turned away, pretending he wasn't there. And then suddenly, he wasn't. "What did you do with the fish?" I asked my husband.

He looked bemused. "What fish?"

He'll never tell.



Big Gil's tragic final days


The former fish pond

What if I asked you to look straight into the sun?  Maybe you would, for a second or two, until the brightness overwhelmed you and you just had to close your eyes. But what if I insisted that you keep looking straight into the sun, no blinking? Would you do it?  You would not. Because you have no desire to damage your vision, and you are not crazy, and if I asked you to do such a thing, I would be the crazy one.

Which brings me to the show I attended the other night at Oakland's historic Fox Theater, a striking art deco former movie theater- turned concert venue that dates back to 1928.  My husband and I had tickets to see Railroad Earth, a country-rock jam band. Being non-boogying boomers with bad knees, we had seats in the mezzanine. The theater customarily takes out the orchestra seats for any act whose music is vaguely danceable so people can smoke pot, crowd each other and jump up and down. Which is fine by me. To everything yada yada.

Anyway, the opening act was pretty loud, but when the main event came out on stage, the sound became unbearable. My husband was covering his ears. You could feel your chair vibrate. Also, your feet, your head and your thyroid. I thought I could recognize a song I knew but it was too loud to know for sure. My spouse, whose hearing is already damaged from attending too many concerts in his reckless hippy days, couldn't take it anymore and moved to the last row of the third tier balcony. I went downstairs to complain. Apparently I was not the first person to do so. The usher directed me to the first aid room where a volunteer was handing out ear plugs.  I grabbed a pair for me and a pair for my spouse.

It was a very long concert, a fact which at a decibel level safe for human existence, we would have appreciated. It's no secret that old rockers get tinnitus and hearing loss. When I've had seats in the orchestra, I have brought ear plugs to concerts - your ears don't ring the next day and you can actually understand the lyrics.  But when it's so loud, you need to protect your ears in the back of the mezzanine, I have to wonder who benefits. Not the band, who are all going to end up deaf as Keith Moon. Nor will they sell a lot of CDs after the show, because who can actually listen to any of the songs at a decibel level loud enough to deafen the nearest dolphin pod?  And not the poor kids in the orchestra, who will end up with hearing damage just like their boomer parents.

The Elephant and the Cow

Auspicious Beginnings.  That was my theme to start the new year. I am not going to wring my hands and bore you with the gory details, but 2014 was a little rough. I needed to usher in 2015 on a positive note. So I signed up for a 2-hour New Year's Day yoga workshop at Mountain Yoga, a sweet, small studio in downtown Montclair. The theme was An Elephantine Celebration, dedicated to Lord Ganesh. With his toddler limbs, Bacchus belly and out-sized elephant head, Ganesh looks like an escapee from The Island of Doctor Moreau. Like all Indian gods and goddesses, Old Trunk-Face has a variety of names. “Destroyer of all Obstacles and Impediments.”  “Bestower of Success and Accomplishments.” “ Grantor of Wishes and Boons.”  But what makes him an especially appropriate New Year’s Day deity is his role as the "Lord of New Beginnings."

The workshop was led by studio owner Ann Dyer, an inspired teacher of yoga and sound sadhana. Ann was engaging and fun, as always. The pace was perfect. I got a gentle work out and a good stretch, and I probably untwisted an emotional kink or two. We learned a simple chant in praise of Ganesh. I can't say I felt any closer to the elephant god - I appreciate Eastern spirituality, but in a purely abstract way.  For me, all the gods and goddesses get in the way of the big ideas. But the class was inspiring and enlivening. I stepped out into the sunshine, humming the Ganesh chant and thinking this had to be an auspicious beginning and 2015 just might possibly not suck.

Like a kite skimming the ground on a breezy day, I was eager for uplift. I decided to take a solo meditative hike in Briones, one of our less-visited regional parks. My husband was in a football trance and would never miss me.  I put on leggings, socks and hiking boots, and several layers of sweaters to keep on or take off as needed. Maggie the schnauzer seemed game, so I put her leash on and packed enough water for both of us.

It was ideal Briones weather. The hills were green as Éire and the sky, a postcard-perfect blue. We passed through the cattle gate at the trail head. A pair of hikers walked ahead of us. Two men and a woman on horseback were coming our way,  accompanied by a pair of herding dogs, a half dozen cows and a couple of calves. The riders and bovines slowed down to a walk to let us pass. One of the hikers got a little too close to a calf and its mother came running.  She lost interest, mid-charge, when the hiker bolted. We left the cattle behind and were strolling along the edge of a tree-lined meadow when out of the forest strode a confident and well-fed coyote. He sat back on his haunches and looked us over. No doubt Maggie would make a fine supper.  Sweeping her up with one arm, I waved my walking stick with the other. "Go away!" I shouted. "Get out of here!" His Wiliness didn't oblige, but came no closer. We kept walking, warning several oncoming dog owners to put their best friends on leashes before rounding the bend.

After a while, we passed one of Briones' inky green vernal pools, temporary ponds that wax and wane with the seasons and rainfall levels. A Great Blue Heron had the whole pool to himself. I stopped to watch him. The landscape glowed in the late afternoon light. Sunshine. Fresh air. Meadows. Trees. Herons. Coyotes. Heck, throw in the cows. Beauty was all around me. Maybe Lord Ganesh was on to something. Maybe this day was an auspicious beginning for 2015. Perhaps that Heron was an omen. Or the coyote. Perhaps...

Shhllllippp....Thwack. That's the sound you make when you slip on a giant cow pie, lose your footing, and land in it arse-first. Did I mention I was wearing leggings? There was nothing to clean my haunches with and I was afraid to get my hands dirty because, well, there would be nothing to clean them with either. The only option was to find a dry patch of grass, roll around in it like a wet dog, and hope to God nobody strolled by. Which is what I did. Thankfully, I only passed three people on the remaining three and a half mile trek back to the car. I tried to look dignified as I walked by, smelling of meadow grass after it's been processed through four ruminant stomachs and a mile of bowels.  I was sure I was getting some kind of toxic rash. I wanted to get back to the car in the worst way. The poor dog could barely keep up.

Minor miracle, I had a towel in the car. It was intended to protect the seat from Maggie the Schnauzer's muddy paws. Sorry, Maggie, I need your towel – poop trumps mud every time.

I fell in a cow pie on New Year's Day. Please, Ganesh, don't tell me that was an omen.

Scat

Apologies to Ella Fitzgerald fans, but this post is not about jazz singing. You could say it's about the usual crap I write about, but I'm not sure that's even definable. So lets just say it's about crap. Crap as in excrement. Dung. Poop. Caca. Feces. Scat. Damn, I feel like I'm four years old and I'm getting a strange urge to finger paint.

Why this sudden interest in waste, you say. Why waste this sudden interest, say I. I swear my recent  colonoscopy had nothing to do with it. (It's OK, I can say that. Katie Couric had one on TV). Re: the procedure, I will step on my soap box for a second and say that if you are hesitating to do this, don't. The worst part is drinking the foul liquid for the prep. The twilight sleep anesthesia is so effective that even though you are conscious in some altered way, you wake up remembering nothing. They should find a way to administer it to you for select portions of your life.

No, what inspired me was walking on a trail that looked like it had just been hit with a shit storm. Shiny little brown beads of goat poop. So not-gross that I had to think for a second about what they might be. I was reminded of a story my grandmother used to tell my sister and me.

When she was a child, "Mamy's"  family would spend the summer in the Vosges Mountains of Alsace. Her father was consumptive, and the mountain air was supposed to have a healing effect. (Alas, all it did was provide him with a scenic place to cough. He died of tuberculosis when my grandmother was eleven.) In order to focus on caring for her husband, my great grandmother hired a temporary nanny, a fresh young peasant girl dressed in traditional Alsatian garb, including headgear in the shape of a giant bow. Her suitor would often stop by with a pink paper cone from the local confectionary, filled to the brim with shiny little round chocolates. This inspired my grandmother to retrieve an empty candy cone from the trash, stuff it with goat turds, and hand it to the nanny with the explanation that her "amoureux" had stopped by with yet another love token. Although it was never confirmed, my sister and I liked to imagine that the poor Nanny was duped and accidentally ate one of our grandmother's "chocolates". Now, as I looked down at the goat droppings all around me, I couldn't help but notice how much they looked like milk duds.

Never mind what you eat, you are what you poop. I notice all kinds of droppings on my hikes. I step around horse pucky on the bridle trails and cow pies in the meadows. I can tell when the deer have been by. I often ask myself, when I pass a particularly large and well-formed turd, if it came from a dog, a coyote, or – jackpot – a mountain lion! I see owl pellets a-plenty, a form of reverse scat consisting of regurgitated fur, feathers and bones. (Apparently, you can get owl pellets by mail order for middle schoolers to dissect in science class and figure out who got eaten.)   But while I think nature is, forgive me, the shit, this is one case where my curiosity has its limits. I won't be developing my excrement expertise any further: There will be no dissecting doody at my house.


Shit show

It's a shitty job, but someone has to do it

Coyote ugly

Big cat scat

Bagatelle

My mother is a bag lady.

No, not the street person kind. The kind that has never seen a bag – paper,  plastic, or cloth – that she can't find a use for. Last Winter, my father got hit by a taxi and broke his leg in two places. Mother and I braved a snow storm to go see him at the rehab facility twice a day. On the way out, she made sure I snagged a couple of the  handy dandy umbrella sacs management had thoughtfully provided by the front door. You just never know when you might need to bag an umbrella or three.

Mother's bags are sorted and organized into strategically placed collections. At the bottom of the basement stairs, in the storage closet, is a pile of neatly folded paper shopping bags, with handles. Just right for gifts or to hold a couple of books. At the top of those same stairs, a dozen large paper grocery bags poke out from a hanging metal holder.  A big plastic bag filled with small plastic bags hangs from a knob on the cabinet below the kitchen sink, and a passel of classic brown paper lunch bags are tucked away behind the spice cabinet. In the bedroom closets, all the linens are stored in transparent zippered plastic cases, their content itemized on handwritten labels that only my mother can read. (Despite this high level of organization, she still forgets what she put where). The fancy printed plastified Whole Paycheck bags hang on a door knob in the coat closet, waiting to be forgotten the next time she goes to the grocery store, which is at least once a day.

Packing for a trip takes my mother forever because everything in the suitcase must be slipped into individual plastic bags to prevent wrinkles. (Warning: don't try this on your face). Shoes are stuffed with tissue paper and individually wrapped in produce bags from the Safeway. I remember when my American grandparents visited, an infrequent childhood event. My mother happened to walk by as Momma Paula was unpacking her unbagged shoes. I heard about this for weeks. Quelle horreure! Scruffy soles black with the detritus of city streets, face down on the underwear and nighties! In my mother's world view, it doesn't get more appalling than that. Needless to say, when I visit my parents, I make a beeline for my bedroom and unpack as fast as I can, lest my mother come upon the evidence of my nonchalant packing style.

After a month in the rehabilitation facility, it was time for my father to go see his orthopedist for a progress report. The home arranged for an ambulance. This being January, mother gathered up some warm clothes and a coat for him to wear. We were about to leave the house when she suddenly  bolted for the stairs. "Where are you going? " I shouted.  "We can't keep the ambulance waiting." "I forgot to get a bag for your father's coat!" she yelled. When I offered to get it for her, I was rebuffed: How could I possibly know what the right bag was, and where it might be? Up the stairs she scampered, on two fake hips and one artificial knee.

After much fumbling and swearing (in French), she finally found the cloth burberry bag she had been looking for, folded my father's coat with a dry cleaner's precision, and stuffed it into the chic plaid tote. We were on our way to see a depressed, just-retired 82 year old whose tibia and fibula were broken just below the knee.  Neither mother nor I had much control over the situation. But damn it, we had a coat bag.

Fly Zone

This summer, our just-married daughter took a temporary job in Oakland and moved in with my husband and me. While we were delighted to have her, it was not an ideal situation for a couple of newlyweds. Her sweetie was clerking for a judge in Los Angeles. They spent hours on the phone each night, and she flew down to LA every Friday for the weekend. During the week, I made nice dinners, played mom and pretended she still needed me. Which she kind of did, because summer is spider season in Northern California. Every night, I would be summoned by frantic screaming. "Mom! MOOOOOOM! There's a hamster-sized spider in the shower!" And down the stairs I'd run, the spider executioner, armed with a shoe and a roll of paper towels.

Meanwhile, spiders weren't the only plague of pests besieging us: the roof rats were back and  gorging on my tomatoes. Last summer, I tried every possible eco-friendly form of rodent repellent and learned that gentle, organic, do-it-yourself pest control only works for hippy earth mothers. This year, I went for the big guns: I bought poison traps, euphemistically called "rodent stations". These are black plastic boxes with little rat-sized tunnels in them. At the end of the tunnel is a sky-blue block of poison that looks like it's made of styrofoam. Why any creature would eat something so obviously inorganic is beyond me. Then again, rodents have their intellectual limitations, even if they can outsmart me. 

I waited to find fang marks in the fruit before placing my first trap. The very next day,  the tomatoes were intact and the entire block of bait had been devoured. Giddy with schadenfreude, I danced around the deck. Ding dong, the rat is dead, long live my veggies.

Little did I know I had disrupted the ecology of our habitat.

It took two days for the odor to manifest itself. The poisoned rat had crawled into the walls to die and the entire downstairs now smelled like the Grim Reaper's man cave. Judging by the area of maximum pungency, the rat was decaying behind a wall in my daughter's bedroom. Breaking down the wall was not an option, so we moved her upstairs to her dad's office. Then we set up the dehumidifier in the bedroom and ran it 24/7.

As the smell got steadily fainter over the next couple of weeks, we started to notice a large number of flies buzzing around the house. And not just ordinary flies: these were thick, hairy and really big. How big? So big, you'd think they were part of the NSA drone program.  So big, a taxidermist could stuff and mount them on a wall plaque. So big, they could date Jeff Goldblum. Big but not sluggish: They had the reflexes and speed to drive a human mad. I stalked them nightly with a yellow swatter and mostly missed. Eventually, I realized I was deadlier with a balled up wet paper towel. It was a grim, disgusting task. I could have used a little help. If only I hadn't done such a good job on the spiders.