A Little Weird

 

We’re just a few days into November, and it’s already weird. Weirder. The last three years have been pretty darn weird, and getting ever weirder, but I’m talking about my personal life here.

First, I got up one day just before Hallowe’en and discovered a witch in my yard: the DitchWitch, and the guys who run it, who dug a shallow trench, put some cable into it, and then covered it all up again. Fun to watch – one of them walks beside the machine and steers it with what looks a lot like a big joystick, and the machine digs the trench and poops out cable into it; and on the trip back, fills the trench in and covers up the cable. The Witch is a heavy-looking thingie, and it’s also really accurate, which amazes me. It was kind of like watching the driver walking next to a gas-fired ox. Cool.

The Witch was there because the company that provides our Wi-Fi service has been insisting for months that if we don’t switch to their new cable-based system, which is supposed to provide much faster computer power, they were going to cut us off October 1. So, since mid-September, we’ve received, and responded to, at least two calls per week from them offering dire warnings and saying we need to sign some sort of approval form, which they hadn’t actually sent to us. About half-way through October they emailed it, The Husband e-signed it and returned it, and thereafter, every couple of days we received a phone call from the company saying we need to sign the form and return it to them, blah, blah, blah.  And calls from someone else in the company saying that now they have the form, the Witch would arrive November 5 to put in the cable. 

Communications company is clearly having trouble communicating with itself!

While all this calling was going on, someone came half-way through October and sprayed bright orange markings on the ground, after determining where our telephone and electric wires (which are buried) run. Then the next week, someone else came and spray-painted white markings on the ground that didn’t correspond to the orange ones. Then just before Hallowe’en, the Witch arrived and dug the trench and laid the cable somewhere in the vague vicinity of the white marks, except where they didn’t.

Now it’s November 7, and we’re still using the old Wi-Fi they were going to cut off Oct. 1, and we’ve stopped getting phone calls from anyone in the company. Hmmm.

Hallowe’en day I wasn’t working, so I filled up my plastic Jack-O’Lantern bucket with rubber snakes and centipedes and spiders, and eyeballs and skulls and star anise, got out my staff, which has lots of trailing, floaty cloth scraps, vampire teeth, bones the First Hound had buried in my garden, a bag of skulls and two chains of skulls and a bag of star anise, and some dried Love Lies Bleeding attached to it; and then put on the Dark Lady costume, which involves long black velvet gloves, a long black skirt and jacket, and lots of veils that you can’t quite see through, and went to run errands.  Everywhere I went I offered whoever I encountered the opportunity to take “a trick for Hallowe’en luck” from my bucket. 

I went a lot of places: the library, post office, quick mart, café, farmstand, co-op, grocery store, veterinarian clinic, dog beauty parlor, farm supply store, garden store, garage, pottery shop, another café, Dunkin’ Donuts, the other co-op, and round about. It was fascinating to see how people reacted: some pretended not to see me; some peered deeply through the veils trying to see if they knew me; some shrieked and ran; some giggled nervously, some refused to put their hands into the bucket because the contents freaked them out, some followed me around to see how other people would react, some tried to pretend there was nothing weird going on, some took photos when they thought I wasn't looking, and several thanked me for coming in and making their day more fun. 

The reaction I liked best was the older woman at the post office who laughed and laughed  and shrieked and asked me all sorts of questions and told me she loved my costume. By the time the kids came out in their costumes at dusk, I was home, with an empty bucket. Next time the Dark Lady gets to go out, she needs to bring more spiders, skulls, eyeballs and star anise (I give those to the people who are too scared to reach in and take something), and some bats, and no centipedes and snakes. 

I haven’t had so much fun in ages!

In my garden, I finally yanked out the fava beans and started cutting out the spent raspberry canes and putting down hay. I stored the bird bath and brought in the solar lights; and cut the sunflowers the birds have emptied of seeds. One morning last week, I counted 11 goldfinches and three chickadees all working at once on the sunflower plant just outside our bathroom window.

I put in two new short paths; and I’ve planted the perennials that have come, and cussed out the company that still hadn’t sent the rest of them – they arrived yesterday and today, just in time for our first snow, and are now living in the vegetable cooler until I can do something about them this weekend.  I can’t convince these plant companies that I live in zone 3, not zone 5. 

The calendula, and pincushion plant, and mints and catnip are still blooming and looking lovely in the garden. I can’t bring myself to yank out the annual calendula, it’s so happily doing its’ thing, in spite of the wickedly cold weather we’ve been having.

One last weird thing: last weekend, after getting our electricity back that the windstorm had crashed for about 36 hours, I spent a day in the kitchen cooking up some stuff that I worried had been not quite cold enough for too long, and also made this week’s soup. This week’s soup was a French onion soup – but I didn’t check first to be sure I had a bottle of red wine to put in it. When I had the soup ready except for the wine, I discovered that all I had in the pantry was a bottle of sparkling moscato in a blue bottle. 

OK, that’s a little odd, but the sparkling would cook out, and moscato would taste ok, it’d just make the soup a little sweeter than usual. I pulled the cork and poured the wine into the soup, and discovered that the wine itself was blue – and the blue didn’t cook out. This week I’m eating a lovely blue-green onion soup, which tastes fine but is doing a number on my brain whenever I take a bite.

Weird.

 

Deb Marshall photos

7 November, 2019

 

Ghosts From My Past

Ghosts From My Past

Many years ago, when the world was young and we were none of us so jaded as we are now, I had been working as the editor of a series of computer magazines, because that’s what young writers did back then, if they didn’t live in New York City where real publishers were located. But Nan – my father’s mother – had become sick and was dying; so I quit my day job in order to be one of her care-takers, and was doing freelance writing and editing work for a few local magazines and newspapers, technical book publishers, and always the ubiquitous computer magazines and computer companies.

This worked well - I could work from home, and set my own odd hours; and after Nan died, I continued freelancing. One year I was hired to write a white paper for a big computer company. White papers are basically lengthy technical statements about something – in this case, a mind-numbingly boring and detailed technical approach - to I don’t remember what.

The deadline was short, and the paper had to be quite long, so I hired The Musician to be my co-author. The Musician had written for me when I was editing computer magazines, so I knew he was up to the task (back then, that’s one of the things under-employed musicians did, too, between concerts); and as important as his writing skills and ability to concentrate on technical jargon were, as importantly he lived in the Northeast Kingdom, a quiet, distraction-free, yet comfortable working place. 

The Musician lived a few miles from the closest small town, down a dirt road, down a dirt road, past an old cemetery, then down a long dirt driveway. There was a beaver pond a few feet from his front door, and the cemetery a short walk through trees and over an old stone wall behind the house. It was quiet, except for the occasional splash of critters in the pond, the birdsong, the crickets in the tall grass, and the click-click-click and scritch-scritch of computer keys and pens. And it was beautiful – it was full autumn, and the daytime sun was warm on our faces as we worked outside in the shelter of the house. When we were thoroughly frustrated with our work, we could scream without alarming any neighbors. And night-time, when it was too dark to work, was filled with the sound of candles sputtering, pages turning; music flowing from the piano as The Musician practiced, filling the shadows of his house with mystery and magic.

About two weeks in, and half-way through version 1.0 of the paper we’d quickly begun referring to as the Black Hole, to mirror its effect on our minds and emotional states – did I mention it was an incredibly long, boring, deadly-dull technical paper? – I couldn’t take it any longer. I got up from the lawn chair where I’d been working, stretched, and announced I was done with it and suggested we toss the whole mess into the beaver pond, then go swimming.

“Right,” The Musician muttered, looking up briefly from the stack of technical sheets he was trying to turn into human language. “I’ll take care of that; you go for a walk and see how you feel afterwards. $1000 fee.“

“Why don’t you come with me? It’s beautiful, it smells like fall, we both need a break,” I wheedled.

“You go. If I take my eyes off this merde for more than a few seconds, I’ll never find my way back here again,” he said. 

Sigh. I knew what he meant – I’d been there.

“OK,” I said. “I’m going down the road.”

“Mmph.”

I headed off down the long driveway, walking on the edge for the pleasure of kicking up dried leaves, enjoying the smell of autumn richness, deer musk, fallen apples. I decided to go explore the cemetery, something I’d been meaning to do but had never gotten around to. This was an old cemetery, there would surely be some interesting gravestones, with elaborate Victorian artwork and interesting snippets of poetry or worldly observations - a perfect change from what I’d been concentrating on for what seemed like years.

I spent half an hour strolling about the near side of the cemetery, brushing leaves away from moss and lichen-covered headstones, enjoying the odd old names, intriguing bits of funeral art and marveling that some old folks had lived to be near 100 years old before they succumbed to time. 

It was time to head back to my worldly toil. I looked across the long cemetery and was surprised to see that I’d been so intent on reading gravestones that I’d missed the arrival of a funeral – or, no, a funeral re-enactment, at the far end of the cemetery. These must be actors, or Victorian re-enactors, I thought: there was a cart drawn by a pair of horses wearing black headpieces, the women were all in long black dresses with long black veils over their heads, I saw black top hats and – were those frock coats on the men? There were only three children, also in dark clothes, holding hands and being very still.

I wanted to creep closer but also didn’t want to disturb whatever re-enactment or play rehearsal was going on. It was late October: maybe the town was going to sponsor a haunted walk around Hallowe’en, and this was the prep for it. It was kind of an artsy town, after all. So I stood and watched for awhile, then crept quietly away. If the enactors were aware of me – and how could they not be? – they didn’t break character.

I hurried back to The Musician’s house, eager to tell him about my discovery. “Is the town doing a haunted Hallowe’en walk or something? Can we go to it?” I was ready for an adventure.

The Musician said nothing for a few long minutes, just stared at me. “There isn’t an acting group in town,” he intoned. “There aren’t haunted walk plans.”

“Must have been a re-enactment, then. Is there an anniversary of something historical that happened coming up?” I suggested.

“No. There isn’t,” The Musician said. And looked at me oddly. 

“Let’s go back and watch,“ I said. “We can ask someone when they’re on their way out.”

“Mmph.” The Musician said. 

We quietly snuck through the treeline and onto the stone wall behind the house to peer into the cemetery closer to where I’d seen the funeral. No one was there. There were no cart tracks. No horse poops. No veiled women or top-hatted men.

“Mmmph.” The Musician said.

Later; many, many days later, after our work was done and I was back home, it occurred to me to get out the notes Nan had made when she and Gramp traveled around back roads and visited cemeteries, tracking the history of ancestors. There it was:  Abigail Webster, died November 1857, Hardwick Center, VT, buried Old Hardwick Cemetery; three surviving children, and husband Cyrus. Abigail was my great, great, great grandmother.

Hmmmph.

For the Concord Monitor, 31 October, 2019: An Odd Scene in a Very Old Cemetery

Photo courtesy Clare McCarthy

Bubba Time

Bubba time

Bubba: noun. 1. A name, usually for a male human; ex: “Hey, Bubba, C’mon over here!” 2. An endearment for a dog, male or female; ex: “Hey, Bubba, how ya doin’? C’mon over here!” 3. A title, or honorific, for a man who knows what he knows and is really good at it, and consequently, is very handy when you need that skill; ex: “Hey, Bubba, c’mon over here! I got a job for ya.”; 4. A description, usually used with an eye-roll, of a man being particularly thick about something; variation on definition 3; ex: “He’s being a real bubba about that.”    ----Deb’s Dictionary of Modern Descriptions

This is an article for guys, especially guys of a certain age.

Recently, a sports-playing friend of the Husband had to undergo major surgery. It was the first time he’d ever had major surgery, and he and the Husband spent a few days moving stuff around in his house to make it easier for him to move around once he was back from the hospital. I was vaguely aware of all that activity, but I’ve never met this particular friend, and pretty much let it all wash over me.

Then I happened to overhear a phone conversation two or three days before the surgery day. The friend was talking to the Husband about when his operation might start, and how he’d call the Husband once he knew the time so the Husband could take him up to the hospital, and then pick him up again the next day. When the conversation was over, the Husband repeated the information to me.

“So who’s staying with him after the operation?” I asked, curious that no family member was doing the transport.

“Oh, no one. His kids and sister are away,” the Husband told me.

OK; I knew the friend was no longer married, but this was new and alarming information. 

“Whoa, whoa whoa!” I started speaking loudly. “You mean they aren’t keeping him overnight in the hospital and no one’s staying with him? That’s completely unacceptable!” 

“He says he’ll be fine,” the Husband explained. “He says ---“

“GET THAT BUBBA ON THE PHONE!” I shouted. I was starting to get agitated. “I HAVE SOME THINGS TO SAY TO HIM!!”

Which he did; and I did, loudly. The essence of the conversation was that his insurance wouldn’t pay for a second overnight, and his adult son wasn’t able to come until the tail-end of the weekend and the other was also away, which meant he’d be on his own for the first three nights post-op. “I have a cell phone,” he said. “I have some frozen dinners I can stick in the microwave. They told me I wouldn’t have any pain so I’ll be fine.”

“Yup. They were lying to you,” I responded. “You can’t be alone for three nights after major surgery, it’s too dangerous. So start thinking who you can call, and don’t argue with me, because as the Husband will tell you, I’m almost always right. I will haunt you until you find someone, so unless you want another call like this, just do it. Now.” All of which is true.

The Husband, of course, was listening to all this. “You’re spending the first night at his house,” I said.

“OK,” he replied. 

 

“So start thinking who else can stay with him,” I insisted.

“There isn’t anyone,” the Husband said. “His family’s in northern VT and his sons are away.”

“What about the sports guys?” I said, starting to get loud again.

“They’re just sports buddies,” the Husband started to make excuses. “We just play together and sometimes have a meal together afterwards. They aren’t really close to him.”

“CALL THEM!”I was shouting again. And then I enumerated some of the many reasons he couldn’t be left alone, at least at night, for the days before his son would arrive. Which I will condense here, because men, as a race, don’t seem to be able to think of this stuff themselves:

•  Major operation. Lots of stuff sewed and screwed and glued back together. Lots of stuff that could, if he was unlucky, start bleeding, shifting, unstitching.

• Major operation. Possibility of blood clotting, bad reaction to drugs, more pain than they promised he’d feel.

•  Major operation. If he was to get up in the middle of the night in a major-operation-sequelae-induced stupor, and tripped --- big bad. Someone needs to be there to call 911.

• If he falls and his cell phone’s in his hand, it’s going to go flying to somewhere on the far side of the room, probably under the couch where he can’t reach it. If he’s stored it in his pocket and he falls on it, it’s going to be smashed beyond use. If he falls and breaks something – arm, leg, neck (don’t scoff, I know someone who broke his neck when he fell off the toilet at night because he fell back to sleep while he was sitting on it), he isn’t going to be in any condition to make that cell phone call. If he even remembered or bothered to carry it with him the few steps to the bathroom. And it didn’t land in the toilet or smash against the side of the tub.

·    That’s a few of the possibilities. What’s important to remember is that if someone’s there, and no awful thing happens, the worst outcome is that the friend staying there might not have slept as well as at home. But if something bad does happen, having someone else in the house could mean the difference between suffering hours of pain, and serious damage to the operation site until someone happens by, discovers the damage, and calls for help; or possibly even death. 

My bigger point is this: Bubbas – guys – you’ve got to start taking responsibility for each other. And you’ve got to be willing, when you need it, to tell your buddies, even if they’re just sports buddies, that you need some help.

This goes for all of us, especially as we don’t all have spouses, or family living near-enough-by, especially as we grow older. But I’m talking mostly to you bubbas, because I don’t know a woman who, under the same circumstances, wouldn’t have been overwhelmed with offers of help from other women – yoga class buddies, church group members, library board acquaintances, even friends who might have to take time off from work and travel a distance to be there. There would be someone staying with the patient the night before, checking in during the day of the operation, visiting the next day, cooking meals to store in the frig, doing house chores, welcoming the patient back with cookies and warm blankies, and someone, or several someones, lined up to be there for a week or more if necessary. These wouldn’t all necessarily be close, BFF friends.

So, guys – if what you’ve got is “just sports buddies” or just guys you know from the gym, or wherever you hang out – these guys are part of your tribe, and not only should you all be willing and able to ask for help when you need it, you should all be ready to offer help and physically be there when it’s necessary. Trust me, your spouses will get it if you have to be away a night or two to stay with a buddy in need. They might even make a casserole.

And if you, who happens to have a spouse or family nearby, is in a similar situation – the rest of you should still hop in there and offer help anyway. There may be gaps in coverage; maybe help with errands would be welcome; maybe the spouse is just not able to be a caretaker at that level. And sometimes just knowing there’s someone else to call on can be a major relief to the main caregiver.

Earlier this year, another one of these sports buddies suffered a heart attack during a game. EMTs came swiftly, he was fine. But no one there, playing the game or in the facility, knew CPR, and for a few days, they were all shaken. When the Husband came home from that game he was traumatized. 

Bubbas – here’s a plea: during some of those post-game lunches, have a few serious conversations about men’s care for your buds. Set up a CPR class for all you sports buddies at the sports place, and make sure everyone attends. Talk about how to handle a situation like the one that came up with the sports buddy this week. Let your hearts hang out; affirm your connections to each other; vow to be warriors in care of each other when need arises.

Yes, it’s ok to include – and call on – your female buddies, too, but chances are if you let them know what’s going on, you won’t have to ask for help, they’ll be there without you asking. And will probably bring soup.

To give credit where it’s due, the sports buddy managed to get the help he needed this week. His up-north sister’s coming for one night, one son got there for the first night, the Husband’s spending tonight, and then his other son will be here on Sunday. We expect that the worst thing that will happen is that a few people won’t get as good a night’s sleep as they might have at home, and the patient himself will be surprised at how very tired he is and how long it lasts.

As the Husband scrambled to help find help, one of the sports buddies stepped up to take the buddy to the hospital, and more wonderfully, three of the Husband’s buddies and acquaintances, who are total strangers to the sports buddy, also offered help. So even if you don’t know who to call – someone you know knows someone else. 

We’re all part of the same huge family, and we all owe aid and succor, when we can possibly give it, to all members of our larger family.  As the old folks would tell us, it’s a blessing to give, and a blessing to receive, and we shouldn’t be afraid to do both. When we ask for help, we open a precious space for blessings to the person who gives help. Cosmic brownie points, if you will.

But you bubbas need to become consciously aware, and have a plan. Bubba always has a plan, and that’s part of his success as a bubba.

Happy to be right about this. Let me know if you need me to clarify anything else.

For the blog, and all the Bubbas: October 25, 2019

Charley Freiberg photo: Autumn Clematis