Slice of Morning

The question today on my Day One Journal App page is “What is your favorite time of day?”  I don’t even have to think about that—it’s right now.  Morning, early morning.  Before the sun has come up, when all but the earliest of the early risers are still asleep.

This morning I was up at 3:30.  I set my coffee to brewing, got the fire stoked up, fed the dogs and cats.  All during my chores, our Yorkie was pretty insistent that I take him outside.  He’s been peeing in the house the past week or so, and has gotten in big trouble as a result, so I think he was wanting to demonstrate that he’s turned over a new leaf.  At least I hope so.

The past few days I have felt hints of spring even though it’s not even February yet.  It has been a strange winter.  When we stepped outside, it was somewhat cold, but refreshing as there was no wind.   I heard a rooster the next place over–not the one to the south of us, who sounds like someone yanks him by the throat each time  he begins to crow, but the one to the north.  He crows full throated and bold, like you expect a rooster to.

I looked to the east, wondering how he knew dawn was approaching.  I could only see our version of what they call “city lights view” in the real estate ads–the lights of the interstate on the other side of the river–against a black sky.  There’s a little sort of respite area there by the exit to Rock Port, Missouri—a MacDonald’s, a steakhouse, gas stations, a few places that sell fireworks.  I don’t remember what else.  No doubt a Subway, because they are ubiquitous in those locations.  From our place, in darkness, though, you can’t tell that.  You can’t see Golden Arches or fluorescent signs advertising competing prices for unleaded.  You can only see the lights, twinkling in the distance, beyond them, a row of flashing red lights marking the wind turbines which stretch from Rock Port up into Iowa.  That’s what I saw when I looked east. No reddish glow of dawn, yet somehow that rooster knew.

Beyond the sound of the rooster, a great horned owl in the distance, the infinitely disturbing call of a screech owl coming from the edge of our woods (seriously–listen to its call on the linked page if you don’t know what it sounds like), it was completely silent, so silent that I was taken aback by the sound of my own voice as I praised the dog for peeing where he was supposed to.  Our porch cats had come out to walk with us, but I didn’t see them at first because of the complete darkness.  I herded them back to the porch, and came inside where our Westie was asleep in front of the fire.  In Phoenix, he used to go outside and sleep against a brick wall in full sun in summertime.  He likes heat.  My coffee was ready.  I pressed it down, poured a cup, took up my spot on the corner of the couch to read, to think, to write.

Why, Hello There!

I really don’t have anything to say at the moment, but I feel like I need to write something in order to get back up to speed on my blogging.  I’ve lost sight of the blog, of my reading, my writing, and I’m trying to focus on those things again.  So let’s just call this an I’m-back post.  Hopefully I will stay back and not wander off for a year or so again.

I’ve been quite busy in the time I’ve not been blogging.  I have two jobs now, one as an adjunct instructor of English and Literature and one as a grant writer/public educator/advocate for a nonprofit in the next town over.  I really love both of them.  It’s so great to have a job (or a couple) where I am in charge of what I’m doing, as opposed to a job where I am at someone else’s beck and call all day long.  It’s also great to have the opportunity to work as a writer.  It’s funny, because my dad was always really resistant to my following that path because he said there was no money in it, I wouldn’t be able to support myself.  I believed that for a long time, and not just because he said so, but because the world kind of tells you that.  You’re not supposed to take risks or do something different.  Instead, you’re supposed to find a traditional job at a traditional business, and you’re supposed to work there until you retire or your position is outsourced.  Heck, even the advice you get about MFA writing programs tells you not to pursue the degree if you’re looking to make money.  But here I am, doing rather well, thank you, because I’ve been able to parlay that degree into a means to earn a living.  So, yes, take risks.  Do what you love, the money will follow.  All that.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not raking it in hand over fist. But I’m making a good living, and I’m enjoying what I do for the first time in my life.

As a result of these changes, though, I’ve lost sight of my reading and writing.  Yesterday I had a wonderful discussion with my friend, Debbie, about Hillary Jordan’s Mudbound, one of the best books I’ve read in some time.  We had a book group before I left Phoenix, and talking to Debbie yesterday made me realize how much I missed that.  We’re planning our next book now, and I’m looking forward to taking that up again.
I’ve also been trying to make a point to write some fiction.  I worked with a lawyer years ago who wrote screenplays on the side.  When I asked him why he wasn’t pursuing that more actively, since he said he loved doing it, he said, “I have talent, but no ambition.”  I kind of feel that way, and it kind of makes me sad.  I feel like I’m a pretty good writer, but I simply am not driven to write fiction and get it out there.  I go in fits and starts, where I’ll research markets and send a bunch of stories out and get rejected or get published, and then I lose interest until the next time.  I actually forgot to read one story I had published; it was live for a month or so before I remembered to go look at it.  And it was a fine journal that I was proud to be included in.  I just lack that drive, for some reason.

I did, however, start fooling around with something interesting a couple of nights ago.  I’m not going to talk about it except to put on virtual paper that it exists, because I don’t want to jinx anything, or write myself out by writing about it instead of actually writing the piece itself.  It has potential to “go long,” though, as my mentor, David Carkeet, used to say about novels versus short stories.  So we’ll see where that goes.

That’s what I’ve got.  Things are great here on the farm.  Tom’s been off work for the past few months, or off traditional work. He’s been working incredibly hard around here, building the screen porch I’ve been wanting, winnowing down the monster pile of wood we had as a result of the storm a couple years ago that took out our beautiful old hackberry tree and our garage.  He has enough wood split for at least all of this winter and next.  His latest project is pulling up the hideous carpet in the guest room and our bedroom to reveal beautiful wood flooring.  I will never understand why people do that.  He’s also doing some really artistic work with deer skulls.

So that’s where I am right now.  Hopefully this post will kick-start me into writing on a regular basis, and writing something that’s a bit more interesting, profound, insightful, whatever.  Fingers crossed.  All that.

 

Our Boo

Instinct

In my yard is the leg of a young rabbit.  It’s been there for two weeks now, gray, fur rustling in the breeze, all that’s left of what Boehner, our orange tabby, killed.  She ate only part of it, and each morning there was less and less, until finally all that was left was the tiny leg.  In the city I had friends who told stories of their cats’ bringing them “presents”—dead birds and mice, little creatures or parts of little creatures that they would place by the door, or worse, bring in the house.  We’ve had those, but we’ve also had larger mammals, squirrels and rabbits, left by the door.  Some of them have been nearly the size of the cats themselves.  Now when the cats yawn and bare their teeth, I notice how long they are.  How white and sharp.

Earlier this month, I was working when Rolo would not stop barking.  I finally went downstairs to try to quiet him down, and just to the side of our well stood two turkeys.  They began to move toward each other and bumped chests, then intertwined their long necks and joined their beaks.  It’s spring, and I thought it was some kind of mating ritual, but it never progressed in that direction.  Instead, they would separate, square off, then rejoin with the neck twisting, the beak locking.  They were so intent on what they were doing that they didn’t see me at the window, didn’t even notice when I slid it open a few inches so I could hear them click and sputter, the ruffle of their feathers.  They began to move closer to me, their necks spun together, held at almost a right angle to the ground, and I realized they were fighting.  They came so close that I could look in the eye of the one who was getting the worst of it.  I don’t know what I expected—some sort of intelligence, ferocity, fear—but what I saw was simply blankness, as if he hadn’t gone into this with any kind of intention; rather, he was simply impelled to challenge a rival without regard for the consequences.

Several months before this, last fall, Tom and I saw a black Lab scampering around the property.  He looked young, and I immediately thought about coyotes.  When we first moved here, there were very few, and the folks in town told us that the farmers and ranchers had shot them all.  They’ve reestablished a population now, and I hear them at night, yipping and howling, usually in the forest across the way, but sometimes in our woods and nearby fields.

We lured the Lab into the dog run, gave him some water and food, played with him a bit.  I called him, rather uncreatively, “Hoover,” because he ate all the food we gave him in seconds.  He was goofy and daffy and had clearly been trained, as he would sit on command and sort of wave his paw when asked to shake.  He wore a collar and we figured he must belong to the people up the road, that he was just on walkabout.  We let him out of the run, and he hung around for a bit, but then returned home.

We have a vast amount of deer here.  They wander around the yard, up and down the driveway, eat pears off the pear tree.  There are so many deer in this area that hunters are allowed to kill does.  This past winter, a wounded doe made its way into our neighbor’s field where it died.  I could see the body from my kitchen window, and I was surprised when the neighbors just left it there.  I commented on that to Tom, and he said that the coyotes would take care of it.

A few days later, I noticed that I couldn’t see the doe’s body.  It looked like something was still there, but I couldn’t tell what, exactly.  I told Tom that he seemed to have been right about the coyotes.  He looked at the spot with his binoculars and said that there was too much still there, that the coyotes would have eaten the whole thing.  “Who did it, then?” I asked him.  “Most likely dogs,” he said.

I watched the doe’s body for a few more weeks from the kitchen window.  It got progressively smaller.  Many times, I saw something black rooting around and digging in it.

A week later, the remains of the doe were covered in snow.  I was baking bread when I noticed Hoover coming up our driveway and heading past the spruces to the field, to the doe.  I went back to my bread until Rolo started barking.  I looked up to see Hoover, a long, white femur in his mouth.  He gave it a shake, then bounded down the driveway toward home.

Reading

I’m getting all into reading lately.  I should probably clarify that: I’ve always been a big reader, but since I spent the bulk of the last decade in school, my reading-for-pleasure train kind of got derailed.  While I’ve never been a fast reader—nor do I want to be—I was always a steady, consistent one, moving from book to book to book, always reading something, always moving forward.  Now I’m still always reading something, but my forward movement has been awfully slow.  That bothers me.

Things got in the way, legitimately got in the way.  School, as I said.  A thousand-mile move away from all things familiar.  That creeping bout of depression I had last year (all better, Ms. H!).  Current affairs.

That last one is bigger than it should be.  I was one of those people who got all involved in politics this past election.  I cared.  I worked hard.  I—okay, yeah, I wanted change.  Now I see I’m not going to get it, or at least the kind of change I wanted, and that frustrates me no end.  I’m becoming really cynical about the whole political process.  I listen to these idiots—you know, I’m stopping right here, because this is what happens.  I begin the litany of what’s wrong, what’s not being fixed to my liking, and I get all in a lather, all upset.  That leads to my surfing around the Internets to find more information on that topic, to read bills pending on it, to email my senators which is a totally pointless task because they don’t flipping care.  I mean, one of them is Ben Nelson.  I emailed him a while back about confirming Dawn Johnsen to the Office of Legal Counsel, and he emailed me back to assure me he shared my concerns about federal funding for abortion.   Not only are Ben and I not on the same page, we’re not even in the same library.

So.  I’m done with that business.  I will keep abreast of current events, but I won’t delve into them.  Instead, I’m going to focus on reading all the good writing that’s out there.  I’m deleting all but a couple political sites from my NetNewsWire feed list and replacing them with feeds from sites like Bookslut and The Millions and with blogs devoted to reading and writing. I want to read the books the big publishers aren’t necessarily embracing—short story collections, literary journals, narrative nonfiction, books from small, independent presses.  Books like these.

So this is what I’ll devote the bulk of my time to:  writing, reading and, if all continues to go well, teaching.  It seems I’m moving toward a life more and more centered on the written word, and it feels like coming home.

Lowering the Bar for a Bit

I have to get back on this blog thing.  I keep holding myself back because I feel like I have to “craft” something, that I can’t just do a simple post that says hey, here’s what’s going on.  But you know, sometimes if you can’t write the entire story, you can at least put down a sentence or two.  So that’s what I’m going to do here.  If nothing else, maybe it will kickstart me into regular postings, which, indeed, was the intent of this blog to begin with.

Of late I have been coming to the realization that I was kind of depressed for a while there, probably dating back to nearly a year ago when we had a tornado-ish thing blow through that took out a lot of our oaks and evergreens and snapped in half rows of redbuds and sumac.  It drastically modified the landscape.  It even blew every last pear off our two pear trees.  It’s only now that we’re getting close to getting all that stuff cleared out, and that’s only if you don’t walk down the path into the woods.  If you go there, it looks like marauding giants ransacked the land, tree after tree after tree is felled, some of them ancient, thick-trunked oaks that you can’t imagine giving in to any sort of wind.  But they did.  Roots and all.

Then we had a couple of cats disappear, the euphemism I’ll use for “killed, I suspect by coyotes.”  I took that pretty hard, because they were my buddy cats, a mother and her kitten who took up residence on our porch and used to walk around after me like two dogs if I went outside.  Ausch, the mother, disappeared first, and then, a few weeks later, her six-month-old kitten, Soxy.  He and I went for a walk in the woods the afternoon before he disappeared.  I’d not seen him go into those woods before, and I wonder sometimes if maybe I hadn’t gone down there, knowing full well he’d likely follow me, if he wouldn’t still be here.  I’m having a hard time getting over that.

Then winter came and it sucked.  Hard.  We had feet of snow.  Wretched, sub-zero cold to the point that we left the tap on drip for days at a time to keep the pipes from freezing.  Days before every storm, NOAA would issue these dire warnings about life-threatening conditions, lethal winds, no visibility.  Normally when we have snow, I go out and shovel if it looks like it’s going to come down for a while so I don’t have such a large volume to deal with later.  This past winter, though, Tom was working nights, and I was here alone. I was afraid to go out and shovel because if I slipped and hit my head (yes, I’ve done that here—twice), I might just freeze out there and die, my plaintive moans for help carried away by the howling wind.

But now it’s summer.  The garden is doing well, and I’ve blanched and frozen several pounds of peas, and the beans are coming in.  We’re staying ahead of the weeds, in spite of Tom’s rotator cuff problems and the stress fracture I managed to get on my foot.  The pear tree is loaded with pears and they look fatter and healthier than I’ve ever seen.  Tom thinks it’s the result of the trees getting that break last year after the storm.  Little surprises are cropping up, like I’m discovering catnip all over the place, blooming catnip.  It’s really lovely, deep green furry leaves and sweet little pink and white flowers. Our remaining cat loves it.  She’s moved onto the porch, where Ausch and Soxy used to live, and she’s been bringing another cat around who, judging by the way she bats him upside the head when he presumes to eat first, may be her kitten.  My roses are growing up the trellis support, and it looks like my dream of mounding a red climber up the side of our front porch could come true.  I discovered that this mystery plant I’ve been watching since we moved here is a blueberry.

Just little things.  Normally, I’d take them for granted.

Soxy

Spring

That is all.

Customer Service

I bought a smart phone. I’d done all this research and waited weeks to pull the trigger and finally this week I did it.

It came within a day, but there was a problem activating it. I did everything I could to avoid calling customer service, but finally I had no choice because Chris G, the person I was chatting with online to resolve the issue, couldn’t help me since I couldn’t remember the name of my first elementary school.  Well, I could, but apparently I had managed to use the name of the school where I attended kindergarten.  Even now the name sounds as if it may not be right, and I can’t fathom what would possess me to select such a ridiculous security question and then give an answer that was likely to bedevil me later, but I did.

So I called customer service, steeling myself for the inevitable telephonic trip to Bangalore.  But no!  I got someone right here in the US.  Things went well, except for my being unable to figure out how to work the touch pad on my phone (yeah, I’ve mastered it now), and I got activated.

Three hours later the phone died.  Very dead. I plugged it into the charger, nothing.  Removed and reinserted the battery, nothing.

Heartened by my customer service experience of a few hours before, I rang up Sprint.  Moments after making my way through the telephonic menus to try to best define my problem, it happened.  I was in India.

I’m not knocking on the folks who work there.  They’re earning a living doing a difficult job. Hey, I was the first line of defense for lawyers for a couple of decades. I know it’s no fun dealing with unhappy people who only need one misstep (and sometimes not even that ) to unload on someone.

No, what drives me mad about outsourced customer service is the scripted empathy.  Or more to the point, the scripted empathy and the overuse of my name.  No, wait—the scripted empathy, overuse of my name, and the overuse of “certainly.”  It’s like they had a group of people sit down and determine what customers calling with problems want.  They want understanding.  They want a connection with the person they’re talking to. They want politeness. Then they crafted these little scripts that the representatives use.  Like I got the “Return” script.  I should have gotten the “Faulty Product” script, but I didn’t.  So my customer service man (I’m sorry that I missed his name, but he talked really fast) said, “I’m sorry to hear that, Ms. Terrilm.  I certainly understand your frustration. I would like to ask you to take the phone to your local Sprint store.  I will be happy to locate that for you.”  I told him no, that my “local” store was a two-hour round trip.  He said, “I certainly understand that, Ms. Terrilm.  I would then like to ask you to take the phone to your local UPS.” I said no, I bought the phone, they sent me a bad one, so I wanted them to arrange to take the bad one away and send me one that worked.  “I certainly understand that, Ms. Terrilm.”  Then he asked if I would agree to wait for a moment while he did the necessary computing.  “While we are waiting, Ms. Terrilm, I would like to ask you:  What is the weather like where you are today?”  I told him.  “I would like to ask you: How was your Easter?”  Sheesh!

We did get things resolved, the fast-talking man and I.  I got my new phone the next day and it works great, I love it, Android’s awesome, all my research paid off.  But in spite of that result, my customer service experience was not satisfying. I’m sure it wasn’t a satisfying experience for my representative, either, barring whatever satisfaction he derives from a job well done.  He’s kept from reacting in a natural way, restrained by the ridiculousness imposed on him by some consultant or whoever’s responsible for the words he has to say. I’m left feeling dissatisfied because I know he’s just reading the stuff.  There’s no genuine interaction, no authenticity, no “You’re kidding?  It died after three hours?  Let me get you fixed right up.”  I’m not saying the guy wasn’t capable of doing that—I’m sure he was.  The system simply doesn’t allow it.

And Ms. Terrilm certainly finds that more frustrating than anything else.

By Request

Zoe arced off the diving board and slashed through the surface of the water.  Barely a splash.  Carol turned to Ken, laughing.  “God, she’s so good, isn’t she?  A natural athlete.”  Zoe rose up at the shallow end of the pool and dipped her head backwards into the water to rinse her hair out of her eyes.  Shanny stood at end of the board.  “Zoe, watch!”  Zoe pushed off the side of the pool and flipped an underwater somersault.  She swam over to her parents and treaded water.

“Did you see me?”

“Sure did, honey.  That was great!  You’re really getting that one down, isn’t she Ken?”

“Zoe, watch!”  Shanny bowed the board and jumped, wrapping her arms around her knees just before she splashed, bottom-first, into the water.   She sputtered up seconds later rubbing the water out of her eyes.  “Did you see, did you see?  It was a cannonball!  I bet you can’t do a cannonball!”

Zoe raised herself out of the water and rolled her eyes at Carol as she made her way to the board for another turn.  She stepped up and locked eyes with Shanny.  Then she skipped to the end, and with a couple of springs got enough vertical to execute a perfect somersault before once again cleanly breaking the surface of the water.  Still submerged, she headed for the shallow end, letting the momentum of her dive and a flick of her legs carry her.  Shanny was hauling herself out of the pool, lumbering for the diving board.

“I can do that!”

Carol swung her feet around off the lounge chair, picked up her bottle of water.  “Okay, guys, it’s getting late.  Shanny, do you want Zoe’s dad to walk you down to the end of the block?”

“It’s not even dark yet!  Just one more!  Can’t I do just one more?”

“One more always turns into two more and then three more with you, Shanny.  We have to go inside.  Zoe needs to get ready for bed.”  She glanced at Zoe, who smiled, then turned to the diving board.

“Yeah, Shanny.  Everyone else left an hour ago.  I have to get ready for bed.”

“I’m just gonna do one more,” Shanny said, climbing onto the board.

“Shanny!” Carol said, “I’ve asked you nicely.  If you don’t get off that board now, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you not to come over tomorrow.”

Shanny stood at the end of the board.  She gave it a bounce, bobbed up and down as it settled.  Then she stepped off.  “Okay!  I was just kidding.”  She walked to the gate, pulling her towel off the fence as she passed.    “I don’t need a walk to the corner.  Bye, Zoe.  I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Bye, Shanny.”  Zoe climbed out of the pool and toweled off slowly.  Then she hung her towel back on the fencing and climbed on to the diving board.  Reeled off another stunner.

“Isn’t she great?” Carol asked Ken, settling back into the chair next to him. “Perfect, Zoe!”

Comfort

It’s rainy and cold today. Spring cold, though, not winter cold, so I can live with it. I have a bird feeder by the kitchen window and the birds have been swarming it all day. They fly up, grab a sunflower seed, go off somewhere to crack it, return for another.  I don’t know how it’s not the bird equivalent of eating celery, requiring more calories to consume than they actually take in from the seed.  But they thrive.  Nuthatches, dark-eyed juncos, a lone downy woodpecker, some chickadees. Tons of cardinals.  My favorite are the titmice.  They’re usually so jaunty, watching me through the window, but today their heads are dispirited, their crests flattened by the rain.

Earlier this week, in a fit of spring cleaning, I decided to shut down the wood stove for the season.  Our wood was the slightest bit green, and while it burned, I was tired of battling it. If I didn’t add wood before the coals got too burned down, it would flame and then and smolder, and I’d have to flip it with the tongs and dig air space out beneath it with the poker.  Finally, I’d get fed up and toss some cedar in there and it would get things going, but we don’t have that much cedar and I’m ready for winter to be over and so I was done.  I’d use the furnace if I needed some heat.

I tossed the wood back on the wood pile, emptied the ash bucket and took it down to the basement along with the wood rack, the tools, these ridiculous red hearth gloves I bought. Then I came upstairs and washed walls, scrubbed the floor, vacuumed, washed the linens and blankets, dusted.  I rearranged the furniture.  Everything looked so tidy and springlike when I was done.

Then this morning it snowed.  It wasn’t that cold, and it melted off during the day, but it snowed. I didn’t have a fire and I missed it.

Barring some primal draw to flame, there’s no reason I should feel that way. I have no childhood memories of a home with a fireplace.  My mom never wanted one.  She’d grown up with one, it was messy and filthy, and she swore that when she had a home of her own, the last thing it would have was a fireplace.

I was baffled by the intensity of her dislike. We had friends who had fireplaces and they weren’t filthy.  I envied them those fireplaces. Whenever we’d visit, I’d sit as close as I dared to the fire in the winter and in the summers I’d stand by the cold hearth, inhaling the damp, ashy smoke-scent, promising myself I’d have a house with a fireplace when I grew up.  And I did. This is my first wood burning stove, though, the first one where I don’t flip a switch or point a remote at a sensor hidden in a basket of pinecones to send the gas flame flickering around the ceramic logs. I know how to build a fire now.  I can look at a piece of split wood and tell you with some certainty what it is.  I can eye it up and feel its heft and tell if it’s ready to burn.

And I also know that my mom was right.  It is messy to heat your house with wood.  Bugs crawl into splits in the logs and they crawl out into your house when the wood warms up.  Dirt, dried leaves, melting snow, bark all accumulate beneath your wood until you get smart enough to tuck an old rug under the rack. You have to scoop ash out of the firebox and it invariably drifts around the house, settling on books and furniture.  I think of her every time I sweep debris into my dustpan with my whisk broom, and I do that a lot.  But there’s no way I’d give up my fire. I like hauling in wood every other day. I like paying attention to the weather reports to make sure I’m prepared for a coming storm.  We’ve heated with wood for two winters now and I’ve loved every minute of it.  I miss the comfort of the fire when, like today, it’s not there.

I can’t ask her for confirmation because she’s gone now, but I suspect my mom hated her fire so much because she didn’t have a choice.  She always talked about growing up in the holler, said that for their sole source of heat they had a big, gaping fireplace that, in spite of its size, didn’t provide much warmth. She stood by it, shivering, as she dressed for school. My grandmother wasn’t much of a housekeeper.  Sometimes during dinner she’d say, “Let’s go to town,” fling an old sheet over the dirty dinner dishes and off they’d go. I imagine a little dust and dirt from the fireplace wouldn’t have bothered her too much.  But it would have bothered my mom, would become something to be left far behind, that mess. That open flame inside her house. That flame that meant comfort only in its absence.

Lost Causes, Answered Prayers

This morning I woke up thinking about St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes.

I didn’t always know he was the patron saint of lost causes. Years ago, after my parents moved to Phoenix and I freaked out and went back to Detroit, I was living with my friend Mary’s family. Mary and I had gone to one of those parking-lot carnivals–the ones that roll in for a weekend with tents and canned calliope music, a ferris wheel and a tilt-a-whirl. I don’t know what possessed us to go to the carnival at all, let alone go on the roller coaster it featured. Especially me. I had a healthy fear of those little carnivals, instilled by my parents who no doubt got a double bonus out of instilling it–they never had to worry about my pestering them to take me to one, and they never had to worry that I’d die, still clutching my cotton candy wand, flung from some poorly maintained ride.

I don’t know, I guess I was trying new things then, emboldened. So I went to this daffy carnival. And nearly lost my purse when the roller coaster plunged down the first hill. I managed to catch it, but some things went flying, one of which I discovered later was my contact case, with my contacts inside.

I had no job then, and no prospects for one. This was Detroit in the late 1970s, and people with years and years of experience were competing vigorously for jobs doing basic data entry and filing–the kind of jobs that I, as a recent high school graduate with no practical skills beyond the ability to type 45 words per minute fairly accurately, could have been expected to fill in a good economy. But this was a horrible economy, a brutal recession. Every day you’d drive down the street and see another restaurant boarded up, another store darkened. It was disheartening to say the least. Maybe that’s why I was at the carnival, for a little bit of joy. Who knows? But I went, and I lost my contacts and I had no way to buy new ones.

I sulked around for a few weeks, wearing my glasses, which I hated because they steamed up every time I blushed and I blushed a lot because things could still embarrass me then. Mary’s mom kept encouraging me to call the community center that had hosted the carnival and ask about my contacts, but I said the likelihood of the little brown case not only being found, but being turned in, on a weekend when the center itself wasn’t even open, was pretty slim. She kept telling me to try.

Mary’s mom went to convent school. Mary and I thought she was hopelessly quaint, and we loved to get her upset by doing things like playing “Only the Good Die Young” really loud so she would yell up the stairs “Isn’t that that song about Catholic girls? I told you I don’t want you two listening to that!” When she got upset, she said “God bless America!” unless she was really upset, and then she would say “Hail Columbia!” Mary and I thought that was hilarious, although I confess that even now l’ll catch myself asking God to bless America when I’m particularly frustrated about something.

I’d had 12 years of Catholic school myself, but my schools were pretty progressive and we didn’t focus too much on saints. So when Mary’s mom finally told me that I needed to ask St. Jude to intercede for me, she had to explain that he was the patron saint of lost causes. I thought, “Sure, okay,” and went about my business which largely consisted of reading all night, then driving Mary to work so I could have her car to look for non-existent work during the day. Then I’d come home and if her mom, who didn’t drive, didn’t need me to take her to the vitamin store or to Farmer Jack’s, I’d go to bed, getting up in time to pick Mary up. Sometimes I’d go “look for a job.” I knew it was pretty pointless after several months of looking, but I figured I should at least keep up pretenses. So I’d drive off somewhere and park the car and sit for a couple of hours. Sometimes, if I could scrape together a buck, I’d buy a Wendy’s single and some fries. I was pretty much a lost cause in my own right.

I kept thinking about St. Jude. Finally, sheepishly, since I really wanted contacts and knew I’d never be able to afford new ones in the foreseeable future, one day I gave it a go. I knelt down, crossed myself for good measure, and told St. Jude that while I wasn’t really convinced he was the solution, I pretty much had the definition of a small-scale lost cause on my hands and I’d appreciate his help. I said a few more holy and faithful sounding things, then I got up, feeling sort of foolish and imagining St. Jude sitting down with God to go over a bullet-pointed list with my missing contacts on the bottom, rightfully below cancer and paralysis. Yeah, I thought. Whatever.

A week went by and then for whatever reason I looked up the number of the community center. I called, spoke to someone who put me on hold for a moment to check the lost and found box. She came back and said, “What color is the case?” “Brown,” I said, and she said, “We have them right here. You’re lucky too, because it’s been a couple of months and at the end of the week we were going to get rid of the old stuff. If you’d called tomorrow, they’d be gone.” I told her my St. Jude story. I figured I owed it to the guy.

I stayed with Mary’s family for a few more months. It took me that long to get fed up, to get tired of the humiliation of having no money and no prospects, of being a freeloader on a family who’d done so much for me. I called my parents, and I moved to Phoenix. I went to school, got a job, got an apartment. Discovered that, yeah, things could go right.