Loathsome Squirrels

I loathe squirrels.  But more about that later.  I truly enjoy the word “loathe”. 

It feels superior to “hate”, which is a short, choppy, forthright invective. 
Loathe… it fairly rolls off one’s tongue with disdain; distancing is inherent, understood. 
Loathe says more. 
I was taught that hate is a strong word – be careful how you use it.  I believe that, in order to hate a person, you have to have had really strong feelings about the person in the first place.  And what if you didn’t?  Then you could just loatheeeeeeeeeeee them…or it.

But then, if that person had really strong feelings for you, and you wanted to get away from them, well then they could very well “hate” or plot vengeance or a vendetta or, at the very least, they could have some dark thought(s) and plan (concentrate) some weirdness to happen to you.  Not necessarily dangerous things, but enough to put a scare in you and make you wonder why….and I wouldn’t call this voodoo or anything that extreme, but well, I think I was under this dark kind of spell for a period of time.  And I know who did it, and I believe it to be true.  But it’s taken me a lot of years to come to this belief.  Mostly because, well, the things that happened to me during that period of time were, well, so very odd.

I once had a squirrel drop out of a tree and fall on my head.  It kinda slid thru my hair and plopped with a splash at my feet in the water.  I was standing knee deep in a lake, talking with a friend.  Ever see a wet squirrel?  Don’t ask. There was a lot of screaming and splashing and running involved. 
For years I had a loathsome reaction to squirrels.  I never thought about why.  A person would say something like “Oh look at the squirrel – isn’t he cute?”
Cute?  CUTE! 
“Rat with a tail” I would spit out vehemently. 

Recently the falling squirrel story tumbled out to a co-worker.  Aha!  Yes, I have a reason (if I need one) to loathe squirrels and then somehow the story of the fish on my windshield came up at the same time.  Was it time to dump my weird animal stories?  Could I possibly interpret this, after all this time, into some deeper meaning?  Well, the fish story happened probably within a year, or maybe it was the same year, of the squirrel falling on my head.

I was on my way home early one evening to my remote log cabin, tucked away in the woods. It was still light enough to see the remains of the day as I made the turn and slowed to coast down the small hill.  SPLAT!  I couldn’t identify what it was immediately.   I mean, who would expect a fish to land on your windshield?  But then I clearly saw it and I slowed down, pulled into the short, rutted area I called a driveway and got out and saw it and then I got a small spade and a dust pan and I kind of scraped it off the windshield into the dustpan and I took it down to the lake and threw it in.  And I didn’t know what to think and so I put it out of my head, just because it was too weird to make sense and other things were taking up more room in my mind.

But the next day when I mentioned this to my bosses and a coworker – all men – they gave me a strange look.  Tom, the Italian guy said “Ooo – that’s bad, I mean it’s like “sleeping with the fishes or something.” I couldn’t take that seriously.  Various theories ensued but the one I went with all these years, was that a passing seagull or hawk or something had inadvertently dropped the fish as he was flying up from the lake, and it dropped on my car.  Okay, logical,  done. 

And there was that other incident involving a lake and the man’s car going in it, and the Chinese food and the new trench coat I had on, but that's probably another story, another time…

Miscellaneous poetic ramblings

Rhinestones on my mind

Not a rhinestone cowboy

not Glenn Campbell on my mind

 

Rhinestones on my mind

No kidney stones

Gall stones

Kept in a jar

 

Rhinestones

Stoner

Stonehenge

Someone I once knew

had an Uncle Stony

 

Rhinestones on my mind

Rolling Stones

Healing stones

Skippin’ stones

 

Stone soup

Stone’s throw

Sticks and stones

Breaking bones

 

Rhinestones on my mind

on my neck

Sparkle on

Sparkle forever

 

 

fun with the fammies

Too much hammies

put her in the jammies

better than the whammies...

 

 

 

 

Al's Box O' Thrills

Neighbor Essay
Home #4

A year after our newlywed status, I asked James to move out. My status changed to “separated single.” I’d never lived by myself before. 

My landlords Al and Sonia lived upstairs, a family of four, or five, or six, depending on which of the boys got kicked out, and whether or not the husband came home.

They had a black Labrador retriever named Monty who picked up tools left lying around the house or the driveway, and buried them diligently in the yard.  Many times, I saw my landlord Al muttering and digging in the yard, retrieving his tools.  They were a rowdy bunch. Sonia, his wife, wore dark glasses outside, and didn’t stop to chat with the other faded house-dressed women in the neighborhood.  She favored bright patterned silk scarves, wound around her head and tied in the back, a la Jackie Onassis.  She wore a trench coat most of the time. 

Al was a cross between John Wayne in swagger and size, and Robert Mitchum in rugged good looks, with that bad boy, intrigue a-foot grin.  He was the self-appointed good will ambassador of the block.  The ladies could be seen hanging onto their front fences smiling broadly for Al, as he walked past the brick row houses.  He had a greeting for them all, talked to everyone, often and long, if you asked too many questions.



Years later, he would turn up as a stage hand on the David Letterman show.  Still some swagger, but more years added in the gut, thicker glasses, a tamped down look about him. Dave regularly exchanged banter with Backstage Al.  Occasionally, the viewers would catch a glimpse of Al, laconically smiling behind the curtain.  The banter developed into a skit called Al’s Box o’ Thrills, where Dave would say “Ok, Al, what’ve you got for me tonight? I’m ready – go!”  And Al would pull a rope off stage, and all sorts of stuff would get dumped out of a giant box over Dave’s head – things like roses or dog biscuits or confetti or something.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2v8fDJSiOEY

 

Anyway, Al and Sonia had three teenage sons and a prepubescent daughter who wore the tightest pants in the world, and lots of pancake make up, making her look like a china doll.  None of the kids spoke to me, though I was barely five years older than any of them. I guess they thought I was a grownup.

In the corner of my bedroom in the apartment in which I tried not to be afraid by myself, was a locked door (situated behind the armoire), that led to the upstairs apartment. I awoke one night to the sounds of a ruckus upstairs.  One of the boys had come home drunk and his mother was letting him have it.  Al got up and got involved, adding his loud voice to the mix. Then there was a scuffle, maybe the boy tripped, or fell backwards over the rail that I knew to be in their kitchen.  He ended up tumbling down the stairs.  My heart stopped, and then thumped and pounded and raced in a panic.  Would he, in desperation, try to come through the door?  What should I do?  I couldn't breathe; couldn't utter a sound. I did what I’d done as a child if I heard a noise somewhere in the house: closed my eyes and pulled the covers over my head.  Was it forever or just a minute that I waited breathlessly?  I never heard him get up.  I never heard Al or Sonia come down the stairs.  All became quiet.  Did he sleep the night in the stairwell, crumpled in a heap, with a wooden stair for a pillow?  I fell asleep.  

But that winter, newly separated from my husband, I met another neighbor.  He gave me a lift in his car one snowy morning as I waited for the bus to get to the subway. The car was a twenty five year old custom Cadillac with gadgets and widgets like I’d never seen before.  He was very proud of his car; it drove like a smooth sailing ship through the streets of Manhattan.  He was tall and rangy and very friendly.  That spring, he left one of his puppies at my door with a note – please name me and I’ll keep you company. Of course I couldn’t have a puppy, but Leo, (who I named for my astrological sign) and I fell in love, and he stayed over often, even though he did his usual puppy things all over the apartment.  After one particularly large puppy load which I attempted to flush down the toilet with a lot of paper towels, I created a big plumbing problem.  I called upstairs for help, but of course made sure to get Leo out of the house first.  Al came to the rescue.  I could not admit to the puppy being the problem, but was mortified wondering what Al might find.  I guess he formed his own conclusions.  But he never asked me about James no longer living there. 

Big Al passed away just last year, remembered for being the Dad of five children and a wife of decades.  I learned that he’d been an Air Force pilot in WWII and had flown 37 missions over enemy territory.  His obit said he’d been trained by Air Force instructor Jimmy Stewart (yes, the actor).

Screaming Woman, Man with Gloves

Neighbor Essay #3

It was the same neighborhood but I started to see it, and hear it, differently.  There was the usual blend of grown-ups and kids; some had more than others.  Mrs. Collins down the block had three boys and wanted a girl so bad that she was always putting her scarf on her head and going to church and praying for a girl.  Mother said “be careful what you wish for” cause she had four girls and knew how much trouble they were, but Mrs. Collins prayed hard and often, and before you know it, she had a girl.  She named her Mary, as she had promised the Blessed Mother she would (she had two more girls after that, but Mother said she hadn’t prayed for them).

There was the short man who wore white gloves all the time and held his hands up in the air kind of, and walked with his mother, even though he was a grown up himself and he didn’t talk to anyone.  And there was Eddie, who had beautiful smooth tan skin and happy eyes, but my Mother said not to get too friendly with him.

The new apartment was larger and lighter.  It had a front room that we called the porch, with windows facing onto the street; the TV was there, and Mother had her African violets on the windowsills.  It was just big enough for two chairs and a small bookcase.  In later years, that room would be a safe haven for boyfriends, situated as it was, at the very front of the railroad style apartment and out of hearing range from the kitchen where my father sat every night after dinner.  Our new landlords had an overweight cocker spaniel named Ginger who didn’t like kids, and had to be carried up the flight of stairs, because something was wrong with her. The landlady’s huffing and puffing, together with her humming, (why doesn’t she get a tune, Mother would say) was a familiar and annoying sound to us. 

My sister and I shared a narrow bedroom, right off the kitchen.  We had twin beds with carved pineapp-ley things as bed posts.  My bed, closest to the door, overshot the doorway by a few inches, so the door could not close.  The window in our bedroom faced the downstairs apartment next door, with an alleyway in between that led to two garages in the back of the houses.  The alleyway was so narrow that Fred the landlord scraped the side of his car more than once as he backed out of the garage. My mother said he should get new glasses.

In the apartment across the alleyway lived a pale young woman named Vivian, with her two pale faced toddler children who had startlingly whitish, blond hair. Her skin was the whitest I’d ever seen and it stretched tight across her face and her pointy nose. She was very thin and narrow and she wore dark, narrow skirts and crisp shirts.  She was rarely seen in the neighborhood, and hardly spoke to anyone if she did. My mother said if she took the children out once in a while, they would get some color in their faces. 

There were early mornings when the sun was barely up, and some evenings when it was just going down, in warmer weather, when private sounds carried chillingly across the narrow alleyway through the windows, cracked open to catch a soft spring breeze. 

It began with the muffled sounds of the children crying or yelling or fighting with each other.  And then she would start yelling and it would get louder and louder, until the wobbly screeching of her voice filled me with terror.  It was different from my mother’s screams, or maybe we are inured to our own family dramas.  Her screams would soon be mixed with the sound of the toddlers, quietly sobbing.  My sister and I would press our pillows over our heads to escape the sound, wishing it to stop. 

It became a part of our lives, and one that we never got used to.