Will You Walk?

Judy’s youngest was about to graduate from college. Her last of four, who marched to a slightly different beat, had taken five years to accomplish this milestone. But accomplish it she did. There were smashed relationships, difficult roommates, changes in majors, demanding professors, and family crisis to contend with but somehow she made it … toughed it out, finished her academics and learned to solve her problems.

Now Judy’s question was: “Will you walk?” Meaning, in the terminology of soon-to-be college graduates, will you go through the ceremony, marching up on the stage with your mortar board tassel slung casually or placed with reverence to the proper side of the traditional graduate’s headgear? Or will you leave the campus hurrying on to the next stage with little sentiment, little regard for the ceremonial, just glad to have it over?

The question hovered over the final weeks until her youngest decided that she wanted this ceremony. She wanted the flowers and photo ops and congratulations that would be denied her if she left the years on the lovely grounds with all its many life lessons in haste. She not only wanted this, she needed this to seal her accomplishment.

The bagpipers led the procession with their haunting ceremonial piping … marching in under the big white tent on the best of sunny May days. Two hours later, the same pipers led the 300-plus newly graduated out, full of pride and barely heard sage wisdom delivered by inspirational speakers.

Judy was not much given to tears, speculation, or to sentimental reflections and thus kept her head down to mask her emotions as these hopeful young souls filed out into the best of sunny May days. What she saw with her eyes lowered was the most amazing array of footwear. Neon green sneakers, flip-flops worn plain or with colorful mismatched socks, snowboard boots, fancy sandals studded with faux jewels, clumpy school marm pumps, Manolo Blahnik heels, scrunchy knee-high boots, polished wingtips, hard-toed work boots, ballet skimmers, and yes, even bare feet showing off tattoos on the arches above the ruby red pedicured toes.

Not only did her daughter march to a slightly different beat, it seemed that this whole group was defying being sheep, not even being like each other. Where would these shoes, these feet, take them? Would some lose their ability to walk due to war or accident or incurable disease? Would a pair of these feet walk through the doors of a medical institution and find a cure for a formerly hopeless disease, or travel into the halls of government and rid it of “gotcha” politics, or travel to Carnegie Hall and impact the world with music?

Judy lifted her eyes from the grassy green aisle trod by the exiting graduates and returned from her reverie to her practical self. She took the photos, gave the spray of roses to her youngest and spread a sumptuous picnic for her family on the lush lawn of the little campus on the best of sunny May days.

It was a time to be in the moment.

Acculturated to Craziness

Emili rapped her knuckles sharply on the window pane above her kitchen sink. Some day she would surely put her hand right through the glass with her agitated knocking.  She did it for two reasons. She did it when she saw a particularly athletic squirrel defy her state-of-the-art squirrel-resistant bird feeder and hang upside down, gorging on the fat black oil sunflower seeds.

She also did it when she saw that crazy lawn keeper once more take out his tiddly-whacker and whiz in her flower bed. Neither the squirrel nor the lawn keeper paid her the least mind.

What the hell was the matter with that boy? He had a body like Adonis (working shirtless as he did, she noticed). He also had Three Stooges tufts of wiry hair poking out over his ears and under his backward baseball cap. Emili had laid down her parameters and her demands for the care of her lawn and flowers but did not think that she had to say it included not being allowed to pee in the petunias. In fairness, he did exactly as she asked and for a surprisingly modest fee.  He had come with the best of recommendations and his work rendered her small gardens pretty enough to be featured in Home and Garden magazine as he arranged pots of coleus and vinca and Martha Washington geraniums.  Lovely, lovely work from the rough Vermont redneck nut who could not keep his zipper zipped.

Emili had moved to Vermont three years ago. She had wanted to get out of the city with its crazy people, pushing and shoving and driven. The quarrels on the subways and the homeless in cardboard boxes on the street depressed her. She longed for a place of gentleness and calm. There was little reason that she could not do the work she did on the Internet in a more peaceful place. Escaping the city craziness, she was not prepared for the rural form of craziness. Here, among the green hills and blazing fall colors, the Vermont crazies were seemingly everywhere. They mowed your lawn, painted your living room, repaired your furniture, wired your kitchen and waited on you at the country store.
 
In addition to the lawn Adonis, there was Tom-Tom. Not Thomas or Tommy or Tom; he was Tom-Tom -- and he made that abundantly clear. He was pleasant enough as he expertly yielded his brushes and rollers on her walls ... IF you called him Tom-Tom. He was firm about his name in a way that defied understanding and hinted at a deeper cause and determination to have something in life his very own way. He sported a scruffy three-day growth of chin whiskers that never seemed to grow or go away. He always wore brown jersey gloves with the fingers cut off and they were always clean, not a spot of paint from her living room dotted the immaculate brown hand covers. Emili had visions of a stack of such gloves in the tool box on the back of his rusty pick-up truck.  Did he go home at night and sever the fingers with a meat cleaver? Or did he use scissors from the Dollar General to amputate the offending fingertips?  How did a vaguely askew painting contractor go about acquiring this unusual trademark? And why?

She tried asking him once.  She thought maybe he was allergic to something in the paint he used or had scars.  His response was a silence so hostile that she backed out of the room in fear and shame that she should question his garb when his work was as near to perfect as she could hope.  His silence let her know it was none of her damn business. This was his business as was the painting in which he took great pride. Tom-Tom had come with glowing recommendations,  not a spot on his record any more than there was a spot on his truncated gloves.

Jake was another one. He was as talkative as Tom-Tom was silent. He babbled on and on while he re-wired her kitchen. He'd start on lengthy one-sided conversations about Johnny and Sam and George and their wives and kids and dogs as if she knew them all and cared deeply about their successes and failures. She might have if she knew who the hell they were but she hadn't a clue who these people were that peppered his incessant chatter. To make matters more difficult, he talked around a chewed stub of a slim cigar. She had made it clear that there was no smoking in her house. But he technically did not smoke it and it did not change any more than Tom-Tom's eternal three-day stubble. The cigar might have been made of some magic substance that did not deteriorate in spite of the spittle that must have soaked it day after day.  What was up with these people?

And there were more. A whole battalion of Eugenes that delivered her FedEx packages, plowed her road, assessed her taxes and waited on her at the Vermont State Liquor store. There was a veritible conspiracy of Eugenes that she found extremely odd.  Who was the Eugene that so prompted the excess of this name in the area? Was he, by chance, the revered grandfather of them all? Was he the local terminator of the deer hunting crowd or a Vietnam hero? Having her questions rebuffed before, she was afraid to ask, to show her ignorance.

Emili did find it vaguely disturbing that she had not found it possible to converse about politics, a good book, the economy or any other quasi-intellectual matter. The only safe subjects seemed to be weather, roads and the job at hand.  Since she did her work at home on the computer, she was often lonely and isolated in this land where the village had more idiots than Hillary had supporters. She so wanted to be accepted but did not know how to KNOW these people.  She was by no means a snob. In fact she had a deep reverence for people who were really in the trenches in their jobs. She was as disturbed by the cocktail party set that knew only the buzz words of education as she was by her cadre of loonies. She had met plenty of people that led life as if they had learned it from CliffsNotes, skimming over life with as little depth as a puddle in a pothole. Where was there balance and connectedness? Still caught up in some of her city paranoia and struggling, she simply did not know how to achieve this.

She did  not know if she should be afraid of these new people that populated her new life. Would she be assaulted by the penis-wielding lawn man? Would Tom-Tom explode in a homicidal rage if she erred once too often and simply called him Tom by accident? Would Jake discover her inability to relate to the locals and leave her wiring hanging dangerously out of holes and sockets while he went to work for a more compatible Johnny, Sam or George? Would one of the Eugenes leave her roads unplowed or toss her FedEx packages into the resulting snow drifts if she could not make the slightest effort to understand them? Unlike the city, where you could avoid confrontations by crossing to the other side of the street or leave the eccentric workers to the apartment building super, here she had to learn to put aside all the oddities and cope or give up.

Until she did one or the other, she took solace in her long walks with Bruno, her chocolate lab, and reveled in the way the sun played on the hilltops and the way the clouds threw shadows on the valley floor.  She read, worked and started dating a pleasant and normal enough man she met at the Northshire Bookstore. She tried to ignore the preponderance of strangeness. Still, she mentioned it to her new boyfriend.  He laughed, recognizing his own adjustment when he moved to Vermont.

"It is all a bit of a test" he said. "Watch, you'll see."

And gradually she did. Her neighbor, an elderly woman with a yapping little Westie, was out walking the critter one icy day when she fell, her leg cocked unnaturally beneath her. When the ambulance arrived, none other than Tom-Tom leaped out of the back and ran to her aid, kneeling and comforting her, his gloved palms stroking her brow.  Tom-Tom?  Her Tom-Tom?  And here, in a matter of minutes, was her road man Eugene, spreading an extra layer of sand on the treacherous ice. Before the volunteers of the Rescue Squad left, her Adonis detached himself from the growing group of on-lookers, pulled a Blue Seal dog bone from the pocket of his now mercifully zipped-up jeans and comforted the whimpering pup.

She was surprised....

The biggest surprise was that she considered these people "hers." A transition had occurred and she did not even know that it had happened. She would make it here after all. She just might even learn to embrace the craziness and enjoy -- without qualms -- the texture of the people as much as she enjoyed the changing of the seasons,  the sun shining on the hilltops and clouds throwing shadows on the valley floor.

Previous Posts:
DreamsWork
Who's a Hero?
In the Still of the Night

DreamsWork

When Abby was in early middle-age she explored all kinds of ways to make sense of an increasingly senseless life. She had been married, had two children, and gotten divorced when they left the nest to search out their own destiny. She had watched her beloved mother die, resisting the curtain of death until the very end. And then she watched her equally resistive father struggle to make a life for himself when much of his reason for living no longer existed.  Where was this mythical mystical Zone where it all made sense? Where was this state where everything was easier and the brain flowed smoothly to a blissful and fulfilling state of mind?

In the past several years she had done yoga, meditated and gone to church. She had traipsed to the gym and done hundreds of laps in the tepid pool at the Rec Center. Her eyes were blurred with reading fiction, non-fiction, and self-help books. She turned on the TV and then she turned it off not wanting to be told by any talking head, left-leaning or right, what to think, or to soak her brain with marginal entertainment. She got massages, took long walks, talked endlessly with friends -- and she dreamed.

It was the dreams that most intrigued her. She had her waking dreams, to be sure; dreams of a body more disciplined and sleek, a beautiful perennial garden blooming in perfect synchronicity throughout the seasons, dreams of her children being comfortable in their own skin and finding happiness.  Other dreams were less defined; hovering in her subconscious, a tantalizing promise of enlightenment and fulfillment but the "aha" moment eluded her over and over again.

So she began to study the phenomenon of sleeping dreams to see what they meant. She had often joked that her dreams were full-length Technicolor Steven Spielberg epics. She loved her dreams and they were—fortunately -- rarely dark or scary. But what did they mean? If she studied and analyzed them, would they help her in her quest to move forward through her mid-life ennui?

She read about the Jungian theory of dreams and scanned the dream dictionaries on Google. She went to dream groups where she shared her dreams with knowledgeable and seeking fellow dreamers. Together they explored prophetic dreams and lucid dreams and dreamers whose brains cast them back to previous lives and ancient times through the nightly firing of synapses. But what she ultimately distilled from her studies, if she learned from her dreams at all, was that she and she alone could interpret the hidden messages. No one had her set of symbols and emotions and culture. What she did learn was to use certain tools to unlock some of the mysteries of her subconscious. Asking: “What does this image mean to you?” (For example, to one person the ocean may represent a relaxing vacation romp, to another a ship-wrecking threat.) “Why did you have this dream now?” “What are the archetypal symbols?”

Abby prepared herself for her nightly dream adventures by closing her eyes and letting pre-dream images roll like the crawl at the bottom of a TV newscast on the screen of her inner eyelids.  Skulls, dragons, starbursts, snowflakes, birds, trees, Salvador Dali forms dripping with distorted images all visited this twilight moment before she started to slip into a dream-filled sleep.

Abby soon learned to discard what were clearly "junk drawer" dreams with no emotional content for her. She also discarded the dream of searching frantically for the thermostat that she had somehow misplaced when her dwelling cooled on a zero night. She knew where the dream of rushing water splashing in her sink came from when she awoke with the urgent need to pee. Abby's questing and sometimes overstimulated brain cleared this excess material with barely a memory of having dreamed at all.

Oh but the dreams that lingered, demanding and insistent, wanting to be deciphered, wanting to be understood and of value. Docile, piebald horses clopping up the lane to her house became ebony-hued thoroughbreds, muscled and strong prancing and tearing up the sod in her dooryard.  A giant oak tree, a symbol of strength, was Swiss-cheesed with woodpecker holes and towered up and up until it erupted in pale green leaves. The dead awoke with smiles. Babies delivered speeches to Congress. Keys changed hands. Over and over again Abby saw change and growth and always she saw these transitions as a good and positive thing -- even if they were sometimes vaguely disturbing, like watching a birth.

By the time Abby saw and accepted the transitions, she was no longer early middle-age. She was approaching that age termed "senior."  Nowadays, she knew without a doubt what she did not like; she would never again dip her toes in the tepid pool at the Rec Center. Leave yoga to the lithe and inclined, not to her. She thought she would keep the massages and continue her reading, but more selectively. She had, in fact, transitioned into knowledge of some of the vicissitudes of life and she was, if not in the Zone, at least more content.

Still Abby wondered why in the world a random childhood friend of her son's came knocking on her door one night in a dream to demand that she hand over Benny Goodman's address book? Benny Goodman -- the King of Swing --  was not even of her generation. He belonged to a bygone era, peaking with his sweet licorice-stick clarinet before she was born. Yet the dream lingered and haunted her in its intensity and demanded her attention. What in the world was this lingering dream telling her? It tickled her funny bone in all its peculiarity and she and yet she was certain there was a message buried in this dream.

Aha, she thought, maybe the message was "move on" as the childhood friend had become a respected adult in real life and Benny with his sweet licorice-stick clarinet had moved on in death – both with accomplishment and with the sweet aura of humor that surrounded the images.

That night, after that revelation, Abby snuggled in her down comforter, welcoming another of her nightly Technicolor epics with great curiosity.  She sought what was there to find and marvel at as she awoke to another day.

Previous Stories:

Who's a Hero?

In the Still of the Night

Under the water and over the dam

Throwback Thursday: Who’s a Hero?

The week was young. It was only Monday afternoon, the Monday before Memorial Day. It was hectic trying to get all the orders done so that there would be plenty of First Prize hot dogs, Koffee Kup buns and Styrofoam coolers. Did we need to turn on the ice machine? Did we have a good supply of Frisbees and Whiffleballs? The coming three-day weekend would kick off the summer season and we had to be prepared.

With a familiar rattle and bang, an old blue pickup truck with a crumbling white cap and 20 years’ worth of bumper stickers pulled up right outside the front door. Old Gib unwound himself from the front seat and proceeded to the back of the truck where he rummaged and tugged until his arms were full. Tall and lean, he looked for all the world like something out of an Audubon print with his knock-kneed flamingo-like gait, pigeon-breasted chest and hawkish nose.

Gib had supplied the Wayside with fishing paraphernalia ever since we bought the store. We depended on him for the right size and type of Mepps, Zebco rod and reel sets, hooks, nets, swivels and other miscellaneous gear suitable for the worm fishermen who share the famous Batten Kill with their fly fishing brothers and sisters.

Gib was trying to get out of the fishing supply business but agreed to beef up our stock for the weekend. His assortment was a little more motley than usual. Some of the Rapala boxes were wrinkled with water stains, and he didn't have any #8 snelled hooks. But he brought in what he had, and he enjoyed his visits to the store, where he sat at the big round table engaging folks with fish stories. His arthritic gnarled hands, covered with liver spots, gestured woodenly as he told his tales. His mostly expressionless face was dominated by the most peculiar mouth, he teeth of which were yellowed and layered. Where the upper teeth met the lower, there was a perfectly round hole as if he had caught bullets in his teeth in a circus act. He would make a circle of his mouth as if he had anticipated someone's astonishment at the size or number of fish that used to be caught in Hopper Brook or the Green River.

We carried on our business between stories and interruptions until we wrangled out what of his remaining stock would be useful. We sealed our deal with a sales slip written out with a stubby pencil and added up the old-fashioned way without the aid of a calculator.

Gib was active in the American Legion, and someone had once mentioned that it was hard to believe looking at him that he’d been a war hero. I had been working on an employee newsletter and wanted to put a bit at the end about remembering the veterans. While we were concluding our transactions, I conversationally said: “I hear that you were quite a hero in World War II.”

Gib was hard of hearing and always slow to answer, so I was not sure he had caught my remark. Imagine my shock and surprise when I looked up from my paperwork to see those rheumy old eyes brimming with tears that leaked over the folds and down his leathery cheeks. “The heroes,” he said, “are still over there.”

Then he began an amazing tale of volunteerism and bravery, protecting our American tanks from Japanese bombs, landing on the beach at Randova, and going down on the US Army Transport Coolidge in 1942. My knowledge of history was so spotty that I could not follow the story in detail, but I did know that while I was talking to this old Vermonter in the worn shirt smelling of engine oil, fish and sweat, I was seeing what made this country great.

Gib was the only one of the squadron leaders serving together who came back alive. After 60 years the scars or were still visible on his psyche, like keloids bumping up the tender skin. Clearly, war hurt and toughened. But it also tenderized in a mysterious way. Gib came back and devoted himself to countless worthy causes: Boy Scouts, the American Legion, Conservation Camp and Hunter Safety. He wanted this to be a country worth fighting for. Each day we all pick our battles and decide “which hill we want to die on.”

Even constrained by the dictates of duty, we pick to do it honorably or not. There is no question about Gib’s choices.

Gib’s heroes are still “over there.” But one of Arlington’s heroes – indeed, one of America’s heroes – is still among us and drives a beat-up blue pickup with a crumbling white cap.

(This story, which originally appeared in my published volume of "Wayside Country Stories," is reposted today both as a nod to Throwback Thursday and in honor of Gib’s wife Ruth who passed away this week.)

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Rabbit Tales

Mind Your Manners

Mush

Rabbit Tales

I am in my car alone.  I want to be alone right now. The funeral service for my Grandpa has just ended -- shovels full of dirt in the deep hole that will be his last earthly home. I am sad for the lessons that now have stopped. His passing leaves a hole in my heart and my life that's as big and deep as his grave.

I loved my Grandpa, though there was a time when I hated him. Not for long, but it was intense when it came to the surface.This was just one the many lessons he taught me: Love and hate are often very close.

From the time I came home from the hospital in a tiny pink outfit with rabbits hopping from the toes to the top, he called me "Bunny." Oh, he called me "Sylvia" too, and sometimes "Sylvie," but in our most endearing moments it was always "Bunny." It seems that traditionally grandfathers have been partial to their grandsons on account of the fact they'd be the ones carrying the family name forward into the future. Nowadays it doesn't matter as much since so many women keep their own last names when they marry -- but that's a different story for another time. My grandpa was partial to me.  We shared so much: deep sapphire eyes, an easy smile and a sunny disposition. When he looked at me, I knew he saw himself in the way that children just know those things.

Now Grandpa was a great hunter and loved the Vermont hills from which which he would procure venison and wild turkey for the family table. I knew that and I accepted that, even from a very young age, the same way farm kids know that hamburger comes from those bucolic-looking cows grazing so calmly in the lush green meadows.

What I didn't know about were the rabbits -- those endearing, charming, long-eared bunnies that inhabited my bedtime stories and provided the touchstone of our relationship. Often, when Grandpa went hunting he'd bring me back the soft white and brindle tails of rabbits. I loved them. They were a special gift and I used them as pretend powder puffs or ornaments for my hair. They were tucked every where in my room -- some beside my lamp, others in the corner of my mirror, and still others scented with Mother's perfume and squirreled away in my dresser drawers. Mother always had to check my pockets before she did the wash as most often a tiny bunny tail was hidden there, a soft and tactile reminder of my protector's love, a tangible wish for my good fortune.

This went on from the time I was four or five until I was eight. I was just starting third grade when we had a show-and-tell time where each student could bring something that they wanted to share with the rest of the class. One by one they would stand in front of the whole class and tell what it was and explain why they had chosen to bring it to school.

I brought in four of the fluffiest rabbit tails in my supply. Swallowing hard to get up the nerve to address my classmates, I went to the front of the room and charged, full speed ahead, with the story: My Grandpa was such a good hunter, you see, he could shoot the tails right off the rabbits in the woods-- without even harming them!

The silence was deafening. I had fully expected my classmates to cheer his obvious skill -- not to mention be envious of my treasures. Instead, what greeted me -- after the long silence -- was an unbelievable snickering.  We were, after all, a community of hunters and even at their young age, many of the boys in my class had already been hunting. Then one particularly grubby boy stood up.

"That there weren't no way that can happen," the boy said. "Them rabbits was in the stew you et.-- and you didn't even know it!"

My face reddened in response and tears sprung to my eyes as I realized that this was most likely true. The teacher, having seen the look of horror and betrayal cross my face, quickly came to my side and gently ushered me out of the classroom. Though teachers must be prepared for anything at "show and tell,"she clearly had not been prepared to witness my moment of truth or to deal with the resulting emotional fallout.

Young as I was, this was my first true awareness that all is not as it seems. A year before I had given up Santa Claus with barely a ripple. He was the spirit of giving, after all, and I still believed in that wholeheartedly. But to have Grandpa revealed in public as a liar and, even worse, someone who used my adoration and trust to perpetuate a falsehood, was more than I could bear.

After an hour in the nurse's office, my mother came to get me. My stomach ached and my eyes were red and swollen. I could not tell her what her father had done to me. I could not tell her how hurtful it was that he had slaughtered Peter Cottontail, defiled the Velveteen Rabbit and made the sweet characters of Beatrix Potter forever sour in my mouth. Truth had been revealed and it was such a bitter pill that my eight-year-old mind, body and soul could not digest it. But the teacher had told her what had happened. To Mother's credit, she remained silent, waiting patiently for me to speak. But I could not.When Grandpa came for supper that night I remained in my room. I could not face him. I hated him.

The class quickly moved on to other things, forgetting my "show and tell" in favor of papier mache globes and volcanoes, double-dutch jump rope, and the intricacies of math. They forgot, but I did not. I had been happy in my ignorance, my head in the sand like a grade-school ostrich, not seeing what I did not want to see. I longed for the hand-holding walks in the woods where Grandpa would point out the edible cinnamon ferns and help me gather the miniature wild strawberries. But I did not know how to go forward.

This lesson I later came to identify with the concept of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater." Was I willing to give up everything because of a single betrayal?  Grandpa had been told what happened and his sadness cast a pall over the entire household. He told my mother that he'd never said that he didn't kill the rabbits. Upon later reflection, I guess he hadn't. This I later came to identify with another concept: That there are sins of omission as well as sins of commission.

The bunny tails disappeared from my room and Grandpa never called me "Bunny" ever again. Eventually we established an uneasy truce. It happened while I was trying to ignore him at the supper table one night and he got caught slipping a bit of fried liver off his plate to the family dog who was forbidden table food. He blushed and laughed and then started laughing harder when he saw that I was laughing with him.  His merriment (or perhaps relief) was so great that tears sprung to his eyes and the moment rolled on, both of us laughing as the terrible past started to recede into the past. (Another lesson I learned through all this is the healing power of laughter.)

So, life went on. The shine of my hero may have been tarnished, but he was still my hero, my teacher, my mentor and my kin. In the kind of linguistic shorthand peculiar to families, we began to identify these kinds of half truths that abound in life as "rabbit tales."

We shared much in the next 19 years until, like in The Velveteen Rabbit, he was worn and frail having lived too much and loved too much.  So, today I just want to be alone and remember and think of all the times his lessons held me in good stead.

Nobody is perfect. And to expect that they are is probably the biggest rabbit tale of the all. My hate was fleeting but my love for him -- and his for me -- did not end with his death.

Just let me be alone for awhile.

Related Stories:
Mind Your Manners
Mush
In the Still of the Night

Mind Your Manners

Good God, what have I done?

I stared down at the tabby cat lying stretched out on the pink fleece pillow.  On one side was my six-year-old daughter, Kim, her blonde curls sharing the pearly fluff.  On the other side was Megan, barely four.  They were at that age where so much is at stake.

They needed to learn to share.  They needed to learn to say "please" and "thank you." They needed to learn to brush their teeth and flush the toilet and put away their toys. And they needed to understand that, if you had a cute little kitten, it would grow into an independent cat that still needed to be given food and water every day. And that the kitty litter had to be changed. And that you needed to make sure your pet was safe from harm.

I was trying -- oh God, was I trying -- to be the good mother and teach these precious bundles that had been entrusted to me how to be good, responsible people.

That is why, when I saw the striped cat wounded at the side of the road barely a quarter of a mile from our house, I slammed on the brakes, hopped out of the car and frantically scooped up the mewling bundle. This cat was our responsibility and it was looking like we had failed in our ultimate task to keep her safe. 

We had gone to Second Chance Animal Shelter just six months before and picked her out from among all the rest. She had such a dainty way of grooming her face with her so-soft paws that we would name her "Miss Priss." The girls adored her and took great joy in picking out toys for her: a feather on a string, a neon plastic ball with a bell and a toy mouse that looked so real at first I'd thought it was a freeze-dried version of the real deal.

Seeing that wounded little wad of striped fur tore at my heart. I momentarily wanted to ignore what I was seeing but I was not capable of that any more than I was capable of writing an opera or running for president. It would set a horrible example. Besides, Kim and Megan were not blind, they too had seen their precious pet in distress.

We sat in the kitchen coddling and cuddling Miss Priss, wiping the dirt from her fur since she was too weak to do her own grooming.  Drops of water were administered with an eye dropper and a flake of tuna was placed on her tongue.  By very dint of their affection, it seemed, the girls were willing that cat back to drowsy health again.

But, as I went to the kitchen sink to rinse out my coffee cup, I was greeted with a "thunk" and a "meow" that made me realize what I had just done: Perched on the ledge outside my kitchen window window sat a hale and hearty Miss Priss her round, amber eyes seeming to mock me.

My head whip-lashed from the scene on the window sill to the scene on the floor inside. Still the skeptic, I ran to the jumbled mess of kids and kitten and lifted the eyelid of my feline patient. A deep sea-green orb stared back -- something I had not noticed in my haste to be a shade-tree veterinarian. Worse yet, the faux patient (no, make that faux pet) had snug between his (yes, his) hind legs a pair of fur-covered balls the size of shelled peas.

BALLS? Now what the hell was I supposed to do?

My impostor pet must have been one of the dozens of barn cats from the farm just down the road.  Now, mind you, we had chosen to rescue a cat from the animal shelter thereby opting for a less in-bred member of the feline species. But our Miss Priss very well could have come from that very same farm so similar were they.  Nonetheless, I would return the male version of Miss Priss to the farmer's wife, an elderly, taciturn, old-school Vermonter. I could begin  to guess what her reaction would be but I could not keep this interloper -- even though I had rescued him -- as you can plainly see one cat was already threatening to be nearly one to many.

When wakefulness stirred the bundle of curls, fur and fleece, I knelt down and stroked with equal affection each member of the pack. I murmured softly to each: "This ... is ... not ... Miss ... Priss." With sleep still hanging thready about the girls, I went on to explain that we would take the cat to its rightful owner Maggie down at the farm.

If I live to be 100 I'll never forget the look on that wiry old woman's face when we arrived at her door with a still-lethargic half-grown tabby cat cradled in a pink fleece pillow. I suspect she'd seen hundreds of cats come and go -- and more than she could count squashed on the road that runs past the farmhouse. While she valued her cats for their ability to keep the grain bins and root cellar rodent-free, she was not given to sentimentality about them. She believed that the fittest would survive without her intervention. I suspect she thought I was nuts.

As I babbled my story, she was silent. She either didn't know what to say or knew exactly what she wanted to say but couldn't bring herself to say it in front of the children. Finally, her lip curled in an indefinable way -- neither smile nor smirk -- and she took the cat-laden pillow from my hands with no more than a nod and a barely audible "Ayup."

As I hastened to get back in the van and away from this awkward encounter, Megan began pulling at my pant leg.

"Mommy, Mommy," she whined.

"What, Megan? WHAT?"

"Mommy, she wasn't very polite. She didn't even say: 'Thank you'."

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Mush

Cary was a simple woman. She often marveled at the needs of her contemporaries that seemed to crave so very much to create the illusion that they were happy -- fancy clothes, long cruises and big houses.  They needed pools and bragging rights, art ownership and club membership. Not that there was anything inherently wrong with these things; she simply did want them or need them to define her.

If she wanted a day of unbridled contentment, Cary would cruise the thrift and consignment shops within a 50-mile radius of her modest home.  Often she went with a friend.  But just as often she went alone, seeking out a treasure of low-end but lovely vintage jewelry.  She knew that she often overlooked other treasures as she poked among the beads and tangled chains of other people’s cast-offs so lately she had been schooling herself to rattle among the coat hangers for a pretty jacket or look on the shelves for a pleasing candle holder or vase for the flowers she grew in her garden.  She rarely found anything she wanted.  Often she came home with a desire to clean out her own congested cupboards and closets, to shed possessions instead of acquiring more.

She would frequently see something that reminded her of a friend or relative, living or dead.  And she treasured these little trips into the psyche of the things that please.  She believed utterly in the messages she found; a ceramic owl, a hummingbird pin, a ruby glass cardinal, a crystal angel -- each calling up a private and personal memory, a bit of wisdom or humor.  She was reassured that her friends, past and present were with her even though she may be alone.  These forays were almost spiritual, and they refreshed her in ways that were hard to explain to her family and friends.

Thus it was a startling thing that she found -- crammed in the back of a dusty shelf in a hole-in-the-wall consignment shop.  While owls and angels are a common motif, a dog sled motif was decidedly rare.  But there it was, tagged with a pasteboard ticket on a string looped around the neck of a carved soapstone musher. It was damaged -- one could see one dog’s muzzle was chipped, and the leading edge of the sled was rough with a broken spot.   The tag read “as is.”

Cary knew immediately that this strange sculpture, imperfect as it was, was destined to go home with her.  She knew mushers.  And it just so happened that, at the moment, she was following the Iditarod, that iconic race through the Alaskan wilderness that was in its final grueling days.  She was privy to some of their challenges and knew of their courage and, sometimes, their heartbreak.  Like the little soapstone statue she held in her hands, sometimes they were hurt in the journey but still basically intact. Her mind drifted back almost 30 years to memories of her friend, Jason.  He was a hardscrabble boy whose love of dog-powered sports started when he hooked up his mongrel, Bo, to his toboggan to gather maple sap in the waning days of Vermont winters. Back then, his knowledge of the word “mush” was solely of the gluey mash that he ate day after day for his morning repast.  Now the word “mush” meant that the snow hooks that anchored his wooden sled to the ground were being released and the yipping, yowling pack of his beloved Siberian Huskies could hit the trail.

After all these years, Jason was training for the CopperBasin 300, a qualifying race for Iditarod dreamers. Cary knew, because of him, that this was a unique sport – really more of a lifestyle -- that it was ancient and elemental; a man and dogs mutually dependent. The whole purity of the endeavor was an anachronism in an era of social media, smart phones and beyond.  What were her musher friends telling her now with this treasure showing up so unexpectedly in her hands at very end of the Iditarod? Why had they appeared on this dusty shelf in the form of a tiny soapstone trinket for her to find?

She pondered the message of perseverance in the face of heartbreak, of work and dreams and elemental connections as she climbed into her dusty car to head to the next thrift shop. But she knew that anything else from here on out would not compare to the tissue-wrapped treasure now in her purse. 

The gods had already spoken for this day.  

Previous Posts:

In the Still of the Night

His Bark Is Worse than His Bite

Under the Water - and Over the Dam