It’s slow right now, with nothing to see, no reason to go out, and so on. About the best I can say is that the avocado trees (three of them, all started from pits) are absolutely delighted with the greenhouse and have been growing exuberantly therein. I almost wish I had done a time-lapse sequence of them…
But otherwise, there’s little to appear here, and so, I’m tackling a few of the odd memory stories, all too short to make a complete post of – lame, perhaps, but then again, you’re not getting a single post out of each of them, so glass half full and all that.
In the town where I grew up [this is always awkward, because we moved when I was seven, and thus it can refer to two different towns depending on perspective, so if you’re a parent, think about what you’re doing to your child’s future blogging difficulties before you make that big move], we used to drive past this low brick wall, part of a landscaping façade on a particular piece of property that I always thought belonged to a church. This wall bore the cryptic message, “We thil M nor,” which I never understood and figured was Latin or something, because that’s what you get when you’re raised catholic. It was, literally, well over a decade before I realized that it was actually supposed to read, “Westhill Manor,” and of course no one in all that time had ever bothered to fix the damn thing.
For christmas one year, we were shipped four filet mignons as appreciation for some major project that my dad had worked on, and they arrived in an insulated container with a block of dry ice to keep them cold. Dry ice is of course an absolute blast to mess with, and my brother-in-law and I had a lot of fun creating fog clouds and bubbling jars of water. At one point he dared me to drink this witches brew, and I thought, Hey, it’s just carbon dioxide – as long as I don’t touch the chunk in the bottom of the jar, it’ll be fine. And so I took a nice slug, remembering that it tasted a bit sour but not otherwise remarkable.
I can vouch for this not being the wisest of moves, because the next day I came down with a throat infection far worse than any I’ve ever had before, taking better than two days to disappear. Carbon dioxide itself isn’t harmful, but whatever else it might be preserving in stasis within is another matter.
As a side note, we’d dropped a large chunk in a jar of water and left it on the porch to see how long it would take to disappear, which was quite a while, really. The next morning when I checked on it, the top half of the jar was frozen solid, with a little meandering channel up through the middle from where the expanding gas had continued to force its way out.
We always had cats when I was growing up, and were notoriously bad about having them spayed because it was expensive; thus, we had several litters of kittens throughout that time. The antics of the kittens were hugely entertaining, naturally, and while I cannot recall the particular maneuver that prompted this, they were responsible for the only complete ‘spit take’ that I’ve ever emitted, spraying the kitchen wall with the milk I was drinking from the spontaneous laughter. Which of course scared the shit out of them.
Not half as bad as the circumstance where one of the five-week-old kittens, obviously in search of the litter pan, darted out the back door onto the porch just as our German shepherd was coming in from the opposite, outside door. The shepherd was just fine with the kittens, but still big and overwhelming, and my mothers laughter and shout to come see brought me out onto the porch, where the kitten, every hair on its body standing out straight, arched back and tiptoe, viewed the dog with horror – with a large pile of shit directly under its tail. Apparently this really can happen.
Another time, the litter of kittens was at that age where they all cavort enthusiastically but a bit clumsily with each other, chasing their siblings around the room and across my parents’ bed. One spotted the full-length mirror on the closet door and realized that there was another entire room that it hadn’t seen yet, with more kittens hurtling around in there. It vaulted off the bed and darted straight for the mirror, but was brought up short right before hopping over the door sill (actually the exposed part of the closet door underneath the bottom edge of the mirror,) by another kitten suddenly getting in its way, nose to nose. There was a momentary pause at its own reflection, but the other room still beckoned, so it simply leaned to the side to jump past this new kitten into the gaping room beyond, and smacked headfirst into the mirror as the other kitten performed the exact same maneuver. There is this particular expression of confusion from cats, the ears laying back alternately with this little head wobble, and the kitten (the original, not the… well, both) displayed this before turning and hurtling off elsewhere.
I provoked this same look of confusion many years later on, when we had the abandoned kittens in the house getting socialized (one of which, though not the one from this story, is presently asleep on the desk immediately to my right as I type this.) Earlier that day, we had been to a promotional thing for area restaurants, where the restaurateurs were providing samples of their foods in a huge outdoor buffet, and I had sampled freely of chili, curious appetizers, spiced chocolates, and many exotic little things, a very eclectic meal of a few bites each. Hours later I was leaning back at my desk sipping a Pepsi with Marley, one of those kittens, nestled onto my chest, head almost beneath my chin. I felt a belch coming on, but it wasn’t fostered solely by the carbonated soda – everything that I’d eaten that day decided to vent forth as soon as the gate opened, and I accidentally blew this horrible rumbler straight into Marley’s face. All those myriad flavors repeated at once with no palate cleanser in between, not the best of experiences, and I knew Marley could sample them too by the look of horror that came across his face before he jumped down and ran away.
In the early nineties when I was working for the humane society, the staff all did rotations for emergency animal rescue on nights and weekends, and during one of my shifts I got a call about a snake in someone’s house. On speaking with the woman, I discovered that she hadn’t actually seen it, but could hear it slithering around above the ceiling over her head. This is unlikely, because snakes don’t really make sounds like the movies want to portray, and you can only hear them ‘slithering’ in certain circumstances, almost certainly not carrying through a ceiling, but at her insistence I agreed to come out and take a look.
The house was fairly deep in the woods and pretty old (for the US at least, built in the thirties or earlier,) and decorated to match, reminiscent of the style that elderly people still had when I was growing up, quite dark inside because the lighting all came from anemic single-bulb fixtures on the walls where the oil lamps used to be. The woman was a distinct match for this, an elderly black woman with a dialect that gave some indication that she’d lived there all her life. It was single-story house, and thankfully the attic had proper access via stairs instead of some ceiling panel, and even a single bulb in the roof peak illuminating most of it. I ventured up with my flashlight, noting the numerous boxes that filled at least half of the space, recognizing that I’d have to shift things for an hour to do a thorough search and not at all inclined to do so; we were rescue, not pest removal. I found several husks of nuts indicated that squirrels and mice had been using the space, and pocketed those to show her that this was almost certainly what she’d been hearing.
I was about to leave when I heard a faint sound behind me, indeed a soft slithering sound, and turned to see a massive black rat snake (properly eastern rat snake, but I didn’t know it then) slipping from between two boxes. About this time she asked if I was seeing anything, and I simply told her to hold on a second. Black rat snakes are harmless, even though this one was in the vicinity of two meters long, and I simply leaned over quickly and grabbed it. It made no attempt to bite but enthusiastically coiled around my arm and smeared me with feces, a common defense. I hadn’t bothered to bring a carrier or a bag with me, so I was going to have to carry it out to the van this way, and I started back down the steps with my arm wrapped in black snake.
“Did you see anything?” she asked before I came into view, and I replied, “Might have,” as I appeared with the snake.
Her eyes grew huge as she said, “Oh lord, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I replied nonchalantly, “but could you get me a couple of wet paper towels?”
“What do you need those for?” she asked, momentarily confused.
“Because he just shit all over my arm.”
“Shut your mouth!” she responded in the most southern way possible, seeming so stereotypical that I couldn’t help but laugh. The whole experience was like stepping back in time half a century, something that I’d never experienced before moving to North Carolina, but there really are rural sections that somehow resist change.
It was some years later that I discovered that she had had two other workers out there on other nights, perhaps even the same week, both discovering that the house was apparently a black snake hostel, though I think I’m the only worker that actually removed one. I can’t recall where exactly this place was, but I’d be delighted to go back just to see it again.
A year or so after this incident, I had just adopted my first cat Ben at the same time that I was dating a supremely psychotic individual, and I’m not using that word cavalierly. Ben occasionally traveled back and forth with me as I spent nights over at her place, and on the night that I broke it off with her, I was attempting to leave when all hell broke loose. That’s a story in itself, but suffice to say that at one point, in someone’s yard a little ways down the street, a police officer was shining his flashlight onto the back of my neck and saying quietly to another, “That’s a bite wound.” Take it from me: heed those signs, and don’t believe that you can change things.
As I was returning to my car to leave once and for all, I discovered that the driver’s side door was still standing open, and Ben had been in the car and not in a carrier. This whole altercation had gone on for better than 45 minutes at this point. I was even more anguished now, realizing that I would have to try and locate a solid black kitten at 1 AM, or return numerous times, and the chances of actually locating him were slim. I cursed despondently and the officer accompanying asked what that was about.
“Oh, my cat had been in the car – try and keep your eyes open for a little black kitten about four months old,” I responded wearily.
“Is that him?” the officer asked, and I could see that his light was shining through the back window of the car, where Ben was standing on the back of the seat, eyes glowing in the flashlight. Despite all the ruckus, the door standing wide open, and my disappearance for so long, Ben hadn’t left the car at all, and for that I will be forever grateful. He remained a faithful companion for eighteen years and several moves, with barely the slightest hint of trouble, and was always happy to meet new people. It could easily have been different from that very night, so all credit to him for staying put.
I find I have to add this one, from when Ben was about six years old. A friend of mine found herself needing someone to watch her dog for a few hours each week, and we wanted to see how my cats (three by this time) would handle it, knowing that the dog was already good with cats, and in fact quite fond of them. This dog (Maya) was a basset/golden retriever mix, basically a low-rider retriever, and stood about a third of a meter tall, so not a lot more than a cat in height (a bit more in mass, however.) So we brought Maya into the house slowly, bringing her down the entry hallway gradually. The two other cats scattered, but Ben always had this fascination with things that terrified him, unable to take his eyes off of them, and so Maya crept slowly up the hall while Ben sat frozen and watched. Eventually they deigned to touch noses, and because Maya had been so hesitant and nonthreatening Ben had held his ground. Maya turned back to her owner in delight at having made a new friend, but then turned a little too quickly back to Ben who, startled, swatted her on the nose.
Maya, unable to fathom what change had just taken place, retreated behind her owner’s legs and viewed Ben with grave mistrust, while Ben observed this carefully. Now, I’m the first to say that Ben was not the brightest tool in the shed, and in fact was quite slow-witted, but he figured out this new dynamic and the advantages that could be had, and for the remainder of that evening, he stalked Maya around the apartment like the best of horror movie villains – not pursuit, just following in a slow, menacing way. At one point he convinced this thirty-kilo dog to clamber onto the couch and up along the back behind her owner until I removed him from the couch and put him in the bedroom (where the other two had long ago sought hideyholes.) Whether there was actual menace in his actions or just this curiosity to keep watching the dog avoid him, I can’t say, but it was certainly amusing to watch, and way out of character for him.