Trust and Consequences

What do women want? Sir Gawain knew (or King Henry, depending on whether you’ve got the folktale or the ballad at hand): we want our own way. But doesn’t everyone want that? I’ve only met one apparently easy-going person ever, and he was shamming. I myself have been named more than stubborn—my own mother called me Stalin in drag: the iron fist in a velvet glove. So when taking care of the dead 25-foot sycamore in the back yard was miles higher on my priority list than on that of my husband, Marc’s, I bit my tongue and awaited an opportunity. It would be breaking trust for me to spend without further discussion the $600.00 a tree-removal specialist had quoted for the job, and due to a thorough and well-demonstrated clumsiness I have been forever banned from any power tools lying around.  I figured a little quick, quiet yard operation with hand tools was in bounds. It would be easier if Marc just happened to be away from the house at the time. When he and his brother, Bill, decided to go to a Padre’s spring training game, I figured that the two hour window between the first pitch and their arrival back home would be plenty of time for me to get the tree down and dealt with. I maintain this discreet willfulness was acceptable--the chaos of that afternoon was due to other character flaws.

I rushed home from work on game-day, entering the house through the garage and noting that Marc must have failed to arm the security system—odd, because he was very precise in all things, but just as well since he was usually the one to disarm and I was none too sure I remembered the code anyway. Out through the garage to get the tools, around to the side gate and in ten minutes I had several lower branches down—just enough to realize that it would have been smarter to trim the higher branches first and that apparently yardmen get paid for more than just their brawn. Back around to the garage to get the ladder. Time was slipping away. I sawed feverishly. The higher branches dropped one by one, mostly over the side yard wall--not as rude as it seems, because next door was a vacant lot, and the retainer wall in between was 20 feet deep and surely no one would notice a few yard trimmings down there in the desert scruff. All the tugging and shaking and swaying of the dead tree must have loosened its roots because the mutilated tree slowly fell toward the fence with me, clinging to the ladder, following. The mangled trunk toppled four or five bricks down the far side and came to rest balanced in the jagged new gap in the block wall. The root ball on the near side dropped dirt clods every few moments on me where I lay flat down on the gound and under the ladder.

I staggered up from my cushion of leafy debris, thinking madly how to hide the evidence of my stubborness and selective honesty in my rapidly shrinking alone time. Perhaps I could lever the whole wretched thing over into the abyss. I ran into the house through the back yard patio door, whereupon the earlier absent robo-voice now announced “intruder alert!” I ran to the control panel across the room and punched in several possible disarm codes on the nearby panel, but could not recall the correct number sequence. The secondary wailing, hideously loud siren followed the first alarm. I was stabbing at the key pad randomly, hoping to hit the right code when the phone rang.

“Are you safe?” the Security One rep asked.

“Yes, yes, I’m fine, this is a false alarm—please, please, please turn off
that awful siren”. “Certainly, ma'am, if you will please give me the security answer”.  I couldn't remember that any better  than I did the disarm code. The siren swung into an even louder “whoop-whoop-whoooooop”. I fiercely regretted my habit of handing off everything systematic to Marc and then never listening to his patient, methodical summaries.  “Blackbury? Cicada? 1984!” “Ma’am, none of those are on our list and you seem very agitated—for your safety, we will contact the police for you.” The phone clicked off, but the siren continued its cyclic wails, whoops and blats.

Explaining the defective alarm, the damaged wall and damnable tree to the police was mildly embarrassing, but more so was the arrival of a familiar car to pulling into the driveway as they questioned me. The security company’s next call after the police had been to the back-up contact Marc had set up, but I knew who that was no more than I did the disarm code or the security answer. It was Marc's brother, Bill. Of course he’d answered his cell phone there in the Hi Corbett field bleachers with Marc sitting right beside him.  What I did learn from the very married moment that followed later that evening was that if I was going to get my own way on the sly, I needed to be quicker, smarter and a tad more attentive to the details of daily life.

An Incident of Cluelessness

Adding a little Joy to our Lives: an Incident of Cluelessness

      Almost everyone has roommate stories, good and bad. At some point in our lives we have shared our homes in a manner that rewarded or punished us. My husband Mike and I have been together over twenty years and have shared our home with many friends along the way. Friends starting over after a bad relationship or bad job, friends in transition or distress, friends down on their luck or lucky enough to travel and couch surf have all been welcomed to our home. We received many gifts from these relationships; new recipes, new songs, new games and new interests that all found their way into our lives from roommates. We are fortunate to still call them all friends…except one. Having her as a roommate nearly lost us our home, our pets, our car, my job and of course our sanity. It did however lead to me learning, a little too late in life, something that I should have learned in kindergarten. It got me thinking about all the things we just assume that everyone else must know.  Turns out, we don’t always know it at all.

                  The whole situation started typically and innocently. Our friend Joy called from Minneapolis for help.  Joy had worked with Mike and me at Clean Water Action a decade earlier and had been a good friend when we lived in Minneapolis. We had kept in touch and knew she was still a committed activist working mostly on issues of social justice and human rights. She was a good person, but a bit flaky. She had failed at her third business attempt in as many years and was broke. The mutual friend she was living with had, according to Joy, become really aggressive toward her and Joy was frightened to stay. As shocked as I was to hear this about our mutual friend, as difficult as it was for me to even imagine her behaving in any of the manners Joy assured me she had; eventually I accepted Joy’s version of the story because…well, who would lie about such a thing?  So, we made arrangements to get her to Tucson and get her back on her feet.

                  At the time we were renting an old converted Fort on Geronimo. An awesome space that we took over when friends left to go back to Iowa and turned over to another friend when we bought our  own home. La Fortuna, or the Fort, plays a role in over a decade of our lives.  It had a huge Arizona room that doubled as my studio and had room left over for a large bed, dresser and two cupboards of storage. We offered this space and of course the use of all common spaces to Joy. The first problem began within minutes of her arrival. She wanted to smoke…in the house…and not just tobacco. We are more than a little supportive of this type of smoking, but we have never smoked anything inside any of our homes. Also we were renting, our landlord was great, but not lenient about drug use. Smoking “not tobacco” in the house could get us evicted. Just off the Arizona room we had enclosed the portico with screens and a security door. It was filled with plants and a charming little wrap-around corner couch, two other chairs, a French mirrored glass table; it was shaded and cool and smelled of the gardenia, hibiscus and citrus plants that grew there. Via a shutter style window, the cats had access to this room all day, but it was a great place for morning tea or evening wine. Not being smokers, we generously offered to let Joy smoke in the portico (it was technically outside) with the understanding she be extremely careful. We thought that would be the worst of our adjustments, again having never had a bad roommate relationship before this.

                  We set to work helping Joy find a job or source of income. She applied at several places and I also invested in beeswax candle making supplies for her. I spent over 200 dollars on her supplies, but much more on the two dozen pots and pans she “borrowed” from my cupboards and then scorched and destroyed during her candle-making “process”. When she did finally have a product she set them all out to “dry” on our patio. In Arizona. In the summer. That’s right—a giant stain of pigmented beeswax melted into the patio. Her second attempt, also funded by me, had much the same result in the trunk of my car. She was transporting them to a booth I had rented her at a Farmer’s Market and claimed that she thought the trunk was air conditioned like the rest of the car.

                  Maybe entrepreneurship wasn’t going to work out for Joy. I talked to my employer. I was working as a retail manager at a neighborhood bead store. I did purchasing, created and taught classes, managed the schedule and worked with the wholesale manager to coordinate advertising. We sometimes hired people with no bead experience to run the cash register, process inventory into stock, restock and clean the store. Joy got hired. So far, so good. A regular job, no more destruction of our property, Joy was earning money and saving for her own place, great!!

                  The situation turned sour slowly and in a variety of ways. Like something going rotten in a jar undetected at the back of the fridge and then one day exploding so vilely and putridly that no amount of cleaning can save the fridge. You just have to chuck it out.

                  My jewelry was often missing and Joy would say she borrowed it and lost it. She seemed earnestly upset to have lost my things and I didn’t want her to feel worse. I knew her to be flaky and absentminded so, of course I believed she had lost my things. Again because… who would lie about such a thing?   Money, liquor, and household items were often missing. We started being more careful with where we put our money and we quit stocking the liquor cupboard. At work she would fail to show up, fail to learn or fulfill her job responsibilities. She communicated misinformation to co-workers. I gave her easier and easier jobs at the bead store. She also told us that we were oppressing her religion and her race because she was a Rastafarian and had the right to be allowed to smoke (not tobacco) in HER home. We assured her that no religion afforded anyone the right to break the law in OUR home. Let alone the fact that she was a Caucasian Scandinavian American Lutheran from Minnesota trying to pull the racism card.

                  She often borrowed my car and twice brought it back with small scratches and dents. Both times she said that it had happened while she was parked, someone else had done it. That does happen and… who would lie about such a thing?  

She owed money to her former roommate, to all of her siblings and to her parents. They called often to try to collect. We had paid her transportation to Arizona and had been fully supporting her since she arrived and she had never offered to contribute or pay us back, but she assured us she was saving for her own place. I believed her. I knew her recent failed flower shop had been a costly mistake and it takes time to recover from financial disasters. Mostly I believed her because…well… who would lie about such a thing? 

                  Joy was also mean to my cats. In her defense, she said she was afraid of cats. Since she had been living with us she had habitually been locking them out of their portico and worse, locking them up in our bedroom. She was constantly shrieking at them and chasing them around the house. I know, some people are genuinely afraid of cats. However, it is worth mentioning that one of my cats was…what is the politically correct term now?...mentally challenged. Her name was Yeats, but she was so kind, docile, meek, loving, trusting, cuddly and happy that she had always been called Buddha, which was short for Wittle Baby Buddha Bear. She purred every single moment of her life and I know because she slept under my head and purred in her sleep. She hid from dogs by closing her eyes while they sniffed her. She was actually bullied by sparrows when we lived on the farm. NO ONE was afraid of Buddha. Yet every time I came home and found my cats locked up, Joy would claim they had been terrifying her.

                  The rotten food was starting to swell inside that jar at the back of the fridge. My boss called me into his office one day and said he was going to have to fire Joy. He was sure she was stealing, but the worst part was that she had blamed me when she got caught; she claimed I authorized her “use” of store materials. (Lots of people who work in a bead store do so because they love beads. Our store was very liberal about keeping our employee’s bead habits well fed; employees got a great discount and all you had to do was write it on your purchase sheet before you took it. We hadn’t had any problems with this system; people were good about paying off their purchases.) Luckily, my boss was a good friend of mine long before being my boss. He knew me very well and disclosed that she had been complaining to him since she was hired that I cruelly gave her all the worst jobs to do: sorting, pricing and cleaning. He was a savvy fella’ and had been running his business for a long time. He knew she was incompetent and that I had tried to utilize her complete lack of skills and motivation to have her get anything done, but he drew the line at theft. He suggested, as a friend, that I do the same.

                  I just could not reconcile my opinion of Joy as a kind, compassionate albeit flaky individual with all the events of untruthfulness. I wasn’t completely naïve, I knew Joy’s perception was extremely skewed and misguided. Now she had accused me of treating her cruelly and of authorizing her to take materials from the store!! If my boss hadn’t known me as well as he did, this could have jeopardized my job!

                  My husband Mike is a patient and kind man, but he had gotten fed up long ago. He argued she was bleeding money out of us, lying, laying around doing drugs, using an entire roll of toilet paper inexplicably every day (which I think secretly upset him more than any of the other problems) and that I was being taken. He called in reinforcements in an intervention-like style; a group of half a dozen trusted friends, who had known me for years, all sitting in the living room calmly inviting me to pull up a chair one evening when I arrived home from work. I knew I wasn’t drunk or on drugs, but it was obvious I needed some sort of help. I sat down with Mike and my friends to review the evidence. They said Joy was intentionally using me. I said she was mistaken and confused. They said Joy was stealing from us and I said she was losing things.  They said Joy was mistreating my cats and claiming to be afraid of BUDDHA and I said I did think that was delusional. They said Joy stole from the store and I said I had no explanation for how she could have misunderstood the purchase policy. They said she didn’t misunderstand, she was a thief!! Then Mike handed me my mail for the day and in it was a fine for not paying a ticket I had received for rear-ending someone. Joy had apparently used my car and my license and gotten into an accident and never said anything about it.

Ed has been my friend since college and knows me to be a very intelligent person, but he has on more than one occasion in my life had to point out the obvious. Or to be clear, he had to point out the giant pink elephant standing in the middle of the room that everybody except me could see. I sat quietly shaking my head and then Ed said, “Cas, you do know that people lie on purpose, right?” I said of course I knew that, people lie all the time, they believe all kinds of things that aren’t true. Everyone in the room shook their heads at me with that look that says, “Oh, you poor sorry sap.” Then Ed said, “No Cas, that is not what I mean. I mean there are people who know what the truth is and tell you something else on purpose. People lie on purpose, they aren’t just confused or misinformed, they are dishonest.” I said okay, yeah, I knew that that happened. Mike said, “Not just in books as a plot catalyst, but actually, in real life.” In my mind I might have heard the sound of glass breaking, it might have been the jar of metaphorically rotten food in at the back of the fridge. She was lying. She was LYING!!! People lied to their friends and to people who trusted them. I agreed she had to go. The next day we told her so.

The following day was catastrophic.  A friend of Joy’s, friend - drug dealer – whatever, had agreed to let her rent a room from her. We were at the house packing Joy’s things when I heard a sickening cat shriek from the kitchen. I ran in to find my sweet baby Buddha trapped on the stove between two lit burners and Joy just standing there staring at her. I ran to Buddha and pulled her off the stove, patted out her burning whiskers and tail fur, turned off the stove and wrapped her in a cold wet dish towel all the time screaming, “Why would you do this, what is wrong with you?” Joy claimed that she had been terrified by Buddha sitting on the counter and had tried to shoo her away. Then, in frightened desperation, she had turned on the stove burners hoping that the fire would scare Buddha down off the counter. Unfortunately, Buddha had run onto the stove instead of off of the counter. It was a lie. She was a lying liar and she was lying right at me!! Her scraggly little “cigarette” was right there on the counter! Out of oblivion to Buddha’s whereabouts or with sick animal cruelty, she started those burners, (two burners!!) and trapped Buddha in terror just to light her “cigarette”. Then stood there doing nothing to save Buddha. Then she LIED about it.

“Get out.” I said. “What? What are you talking about?” she stammered at me. “I said get out of my house now!” I shoved her out the door. “Get out!! We’ll bring your things over tonight, don’t ever come back.” We drove her things over to her new apartment that night. Her new roommate blissfully unaware said Joy had agreed to pay half the rent as soon as she paid off a few other bills of course. I laughed and told her that she should get paid up front. Then I went home to nurse my wounded cat and wonder really how you could possibly use an entire roll of toilet paper everyday.    

Assisted Evolution

Sadly, I stand as a murderer today. I was filling up our backyard pond by hose yesterday because the auto-fill function has been broken for months. Perhaps today it will be fixed because Roger, my plumbing-capable nephew, is coming over to take another water-based disaster out of my life and far, far away: a miserable, mountainous mistake of a portable (hardly) spa). As happens so frequently, I stood on the patio for quite a long time, distracted by nothing in particular. The water lapping my shoes where I stood staring at the new leaves on the bottle trees startled me back to garden duty and I ran to turn off the spigot. Dozens of tiny tadpoles were swimming frantically in the ¼” halo of water skimming the concrete patio that overhangs the pond. Wondering where they’d come from—there’d never been anything but algae in that pond before—I swept those that I could back into the pond with a broom I’d left out. I hoped the tads would sink, but they were pulled back with the overflow returning to the concrete. I ran into the house, grabbed a soup pot from the kitchen and bailed water by the gallon onto the nearby plants. I realized tadpoles were raining down onto the lilies with every overturned potful. I ran a second time into the kitchen for a colander to fit over the pot rim, but the one handy had holes too large. My crashing and banging around in the cabinets woke my husband, Marc, from a summer nap but I triumphantly hauled out a sieve from over the stove. I rushed out the French doors a second time, immediately slipped on the wet cement patio and went down hard on one knee. Marc tried  to get me into the house for some ice and an explanation, but I still hoped to avoid a mass extermination. I limped back to the pond to pour pot after pot of water over the sieve held steady between my feet, trying to balance speed with force so fewer tadpoles were transported airborne to an uncertain fate. 

There were many unfortunate victims in the end, some who perished on the plants or fried on the concrete, others who were found later stuck on my person like short-tailed beauty marks, but I believe those I rescued (after admittedly introducing them to peril) number at least fifty. A few of the survivors will go home later today with Roger, bound for great-niece Emily’s brand new amphibian habitat. I’m sure they will thrive. We’re such an ecology-minded family.

Kitchen Catastrophy #1

One of my coworkers asked me to house sit for her while she went out of town with her family. They’re basically an awesome couple who genuinely like me and their kid is completely sweet. So I instantly said yes. It also helps that they have a sweet house that’s very unique and artsy. I would have my own tiny house complete with cats (also a dog and chickens… who, while I don’t hate, I feel quite apathetic towards) for a whole week. This was before I moved out of my parents’ house so it would be like living on my own.  It was gonna be fantastic. Things got even better when she had me over to show me the ropes. You know, this is the cat food, they eat this much, this is the dog food, they eat this much, this is the chicken feed, they eat this much, gather the eggs, lock the doors, water the plants, put out fires, don’t let hobos in, etc. And then, at the end she adds: “You can have a few friends over if you want to…  Eat the food in the fridge!  Have some drinks. Enjoy yourself!” Magic. Words. Have a party and drink free booze at someone else’s house? Eat free food? Yes please and thank you. But seriously. These wonderful people had a veritable cornucopia of alcoholic beverages. And me and my friends had free range.

Second gold mine discovered: As I scope the place out (like everyone who has ever house sat does) I find all the seasons of Coupling, which I had always wanted to watch. Coupling is like British “Friends” with an epic amount of sex.  I commenced to watching this show like an obsessed nut.

Let the comedy of errors begin.

Friday - Coupling extravaganza. I make it through the entire first season and pass out on the sofa with the dog. Thinking back this is rather alarming since the sofa is sort of small and the dog is basically the same size as me.

Saturday night- When I get bored of the solitary existence that I’ve cultivated, I call my friends to come over and we decide to have a vampire movie marathon, beginning with that 80’s movie with the guy from that TV show that my mom likes.  We make a stupid amount of pasta and pop the cork on a bottle of wine. We make it through four movies and two bottles of wine. I make it through two and a half movies and one bottle of wine. Allow me to reiterate: one bottle of wine to myself. I wake up the next day and, for the first time in my short career as a 21 year old, I am still drunk from the night before. Waking up drunk the next day is simply awful. You joke about it like, “Wouldn’t that be hilarious?” But… it’s totally not. You feel sort of hung over but still drunk at the same time. Everything is too bright and moving too fast but you still feel… wasted. Totally wasted. Waking up drunk is completely horrific. By the next day, you’re ready for the party to be over. I spend the day watching season two of Coupling.

Sunday night- I’m finishing up season two and I decide to make a pizza before I head over to play D&D with friends. I find a pizza in the freezer and preheat the oven. I dig around for a pizza pan/tray thing. There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to find something specific in someone else’s kitchen.  You can only hope it’s logical, and it usually is… but slightly wrong. You find the silverware drawer on the left of the stove instead of the right and you think, what is this doing here? How is this organized? How can they live like this?!

Anyway, I find a pan and it’s all flippy floppy and black and plastic. I think,”Wow! This is amazing! It’s an oven safe flippy plastic pizza pan! You’d think this would melt but it’s just the right size, so it must be a pizza pan! Technology is AWESOME! I bet they use this shit at NASA!”  I put the pizza on it and pop it in the oven, set the timer for 20 minutes and sit back down to more Coupling. The timer goes off, and I reluctantly pause the episode. I open the oven and a black oozing horror greets me with a waft of toxic smoke.  The pan is gone. Instead I find the creature from the black lagoon melted on the bottom of my coworker’s oven.  I am completely horrified. The atrocity before my eyes defies all logic. The pan… that I put in the oven…with the pizza…has…MELTED?

 I take the pizza out. It looks delicious… I check out the bottom. It’s covered with the black plague turned molten lava. I sadly escort the pizza to the trash can, where I see the original pizza box. It says, “Place pizza directly on oven rack.” Insinuating, of course, THAT I DID NOT NEED A PIZZA PAN. At this point I want to kill myself and the makers of the stupid little pan. I frantically dig through the cupboard where I found the floppy bastard and find others of the same make but different sizes… with matching silver bowls… I have baked a pizza on a mixing bowl lid. I melted a mixing bowl lid in my coworker’s oven in the most ignorant kitchen disaster I have yet to be part of.

I sit in front of the open oven feeling my face crisp in the residual heat and cry, gesturing at the goo with gloves on my hands in a manner that may have indicated that I knew what I was doing, but really just conveyed my horror where words had failed me.  The dog stared at me in abject confusion. Her owners left her with a crazy person.  I pull out the oven racks with mitts and set them in the sink. The black viscous terror oozes and refuses to become separate from its new superheated metal home. It’s completely disgusting. So I do what I do in any other situation where I have made a huge mistake and have no idea how to fix it. I call my dad.

“Daddy….!” I tell him what horrors have befallen me. He tells me to wait and let the abomination dry before I try to clean it up. I like this plan. It means I don’t have to do anything right now. I close the oven and reassure the dog by giving her a treat. She accepts this as proof of sanity. I call Dominos and order a large pepperoni pizza. I un-pause the episode and powerhouse through the pizza, trying not to wallow in guilt and only somewhat succeeding by telling myself that it’ll be easy to clean once its dry.  I head out to D&D where everyone tells me they would have cleaned it BEFORE it hardened to the consistency of steel. This does not make me feel better. I go back to the house and sleep.

Monday - The next morning, despite intense wishing that it might disappear, the toxic sludge has hardened to the approximate impenetrability of Teflon.  Before I leave, as I feed all the animals and search for eggs amongst shit stained hay, my coworker, whom I genuinely love, calls to see how things are going. And I blatantly lie. I have no idea how to convey my stupidity over the phone where I can’t guilt trip them into feeling bad for me because I’m cute. EVERYTHING IS GOING GREAT.

After work, I head to the grocery store, where I buy some super scrubby soap stuff for ovens, rubber gloves, and three plastic spatulas. The spatulas are not an apology gift as I previously thought when my dad told me to buy them but instead scraping tools to get the plastic off the delicate porcelain lining that the oven has because it’s of an older variety. While a super intense metal spatula would scrape the mess off in one fell swoop (ok, a few fell swoops) it would also scratch the inside of the oven to hell. And since I didn’t want to give my friends another reason to suffocate me as a precaution just case I decide to spread my stupidity through procreation, I bought the plastic spatulas.

I get back to the house and sit down in front of the open oven. I think about Sylvia Plath. I get up and watch some Coupling to get myself in the right frame of mind. I figure I should probably study for tomorrow’s test at school… then I’m hungry so I find a snack. Watch some more Coupling. Get up and stare at the stove.  It’s eight p.m. I get to work.  Fifteen minutes later and my knees hurt from kneeling and my arms hurts from pushing the spatulas down as I scrape and my back hurts from leaning over at an odd angle and the wicked foe that has beleaguered the oven had hardly given way at all. I was exhausted. I called my dad.

My dad loves me with all his heart and could hear the agony and panic in my voice. He drove all the way across town and cleaned someone else’s oven. To this day he still hasn’t met the people whose oven I begged him to help me clean. He made headway where I had merely poked at the mess. Who am I joking? My dad practically cleaned the entire oven. I may have scraped some of the mess off of the oven racks that were still sadly soaking in the kitchen sink… but my dad had to help me get the tough spots. I blame my weak hands. I’m not cut out for hard labor.

So the oven is pretty much clean except for a little bit of plastic residue. My father tells me to put the oven through a self-clean cycle and then I could just wipe it out in the morning and the oven would be good as new, cleaner than it had been before. I do this and get ready for bed. It’ll go through its self-clean cycle tonight and I’ll wipe it clean in the morning, I tell myself. Everything is going to be ok.  As I’m brushing my teeth I remember about my test tomorrow. Shit shit shit shit!!! I study for a few minutes and then turn off the light and snuggle down, desperately wishing that knowledge on the Baroque Period in Europe will solidify in my brain while I sleep and I will be miraculously ready for the test.

I’m lying in the dark and am almost asleep when I start to think about the oven slowly super heating the plastic again, and releasing a deadly silent poison that drifts through the house, killing me in my sleep. And ovens exploding.  And about houses burning down because an oven was left on while an innocent girl sleeps. I sit up.

I check on the oven. It’s now 12:30 a.m. The oven is emitting a strange smoky smell, which apparently, is normal for ovens going through a self-clean cycle, mostly because they’re burning shit up inside of them. I know this now. But that night, I was seriously convinced that the oven was gonna explode. Or release a deadly fume. And if it didn’t kill me, it would probably kill their pets or something which would be insanely worse. Aside from, you know, being dead and everything. So I sit in front of the oven in my pajamas and watch it cook itself THE ENTIRE TIME, every once in a while inhaling deeply through my nose trying to detect deadly vapors. The self-clean takes forever and I fall into bed around 3 a.m.

I wake up at 10 a.m. to my alarm going off, which is weird because it’s supposed to go off at 9… which it did. I slept through an hour of the weird rave club music that I have chosen for my alarm because it’s obnoxious as hell. My class starts in ten minutes. I am forty minutes away from school. I sigh and slouch to my computer to write my instructor my excuse and since I actually really like this teacher, and know he’ll believe me, I tell him the truth. Then I go back to sleep.

I did clean the oven out and it looked cleaner than ever before. My friend and her husband thought the whole scenario was hilarious and liked their newly cleaned oven. When I go back to school I am able to take the test late and I get a “C”…thank god I got those extra days to study. I go in and talk to my teacher when I receive my test score to thank him for letting me take the test, and for believing my story. He laughed and said, “Don’t worry about it! I thought it was so funny, I sent it to all my co-workers as the best excuse I’ve ever gotten. Everyone thinks it’s fantastic!”

“Hi, Neighbor!!”; an Incident of Clutziness

It is hard to believe that as recently as ten years ago everyone did not carry a cell phone everywhere they went, but I know it is true because I did not have a cell phone with me when the accident occurred. That is why I had to meet my new neighbors for the first time covered in blood and paint to ask for the use of a phone. When my husband and I bought our house, it was a bit of a fixer-upper. We very smartly kept renting our old house for a month after we bought our new house so we could get some big messy projects done and be able to move in comfortably. My husband, Mike, was tiling the entire house, closing the back ramada in for a catio (patio for indoor cats) and building a hearth for the fireplace. I was painting every wall in the house a different and very bold color. I know, but this is our dream home. However, I was falling behind. For completely logistic purposes, it made sense for me to paint the rooms halfway between Mike’s work of tiling. He would tear out the carpets and prep his floor for the Saltillo, then I would paint the walls without concern for little spills and drips falling on the subfloor and then he would lay the tile and cove base. The problem we were having is that he was a professional tile installer and I was a bit slower at painting. Even though he was working his full time day job and only working on our house in the evenings, I was still seriously behind. So, we decided to call in some help. Several of my friends agreed to come and help for a day or a wall so I could catch up to Mike.

On the day of the accident my friend Kris was going to be joining me. She and I thought we could get the living room and dining room completed in one devoted day. I still had the top of one wall left to finish in the den so, I got there an hour before I was expecting her, to go ahead and wrap that up. Step one, set up extension ladder over the top of the window. Step two, fill tray with bright yellow paint and climb the ladder brush in hand. Step three, paint happily for about 15 minutes completely unaware of impending agony. Step four, experience strange sinking feeling in my stomach akin to riding a rolling coaster. I was only briefly aware that the ladder was falling before my head slammed into the wall in front of me and knocked me out cold. As it turns out the ladder didn’t so much fall as it did ride down the wall all the way to the floor, someone apparently did not set the ladder the right direction. You could be one of those nitpicky perfectionists and refer back to step one, or you could take my word for it that I am pretty sure it wasn’t my fault. The first time I tried to wake up, I was half under the ladder half awkwardly draped over the ladder and my head was resting in orange paint, not yellow. You know because red and yellow…The second time I woke up I must have had a great deal of success, but I don’t recall any of it. The third time I woke up I was sitting outside on a chair in our soon-to-be-a-catio ramada fully conscious and covered with injuries.

I began a quick assessment by wiggling my toes and feet, ankles and knees…wait I must have walked out here, right? So, my legs must work. I went ahead and stood up to prove my theory. Ow. Ow. Ow. My head. It is my head that hurts. I feel it, it is very painty and bloody. Now what? Call Kris, tell her I might like to go to the hospital. I don’t have a phone, nor is there one hooked up at the house yet. (We wanted to keep the same number so I have to call the phone company when we are ready for the switch-over day.) Well, I can walk if I stand up slower so, let’s go meet my new neighbors!!! I am unaware at this point that I am pretty much covered in blood, my left shoulder and elbow are completely dislocated putting my shoulder sort of in my ear, my left arm is broken in two places, there is a giant swollen gash across my forehead and for strictly slapstick effect, a paint key sticking out of my shin.

Ding dong. “Hello, who is it?” comes the thickly New York accented voice of my neighbor named, like my husband, Mike. “Uh, hi..it’s your new neighbor, we bought the house next door and I have had a little bit of an accident. I was wondering if I could use your phone.” Neighbor Mike, a person who along with his wife, Gale, we have come to like, trust and thoroughly enjoy living next door to, opens the door and calmly holds his hand up over his mouth while slowly shaking his head. “Yeah, Yeah, come in sit down, let me get you a phone…anything else, some water?” That would be great, I say and maybe a couple of aspirin. Mike brings me all these things and listens while I tell Kris that I am at my neighbor’s, I’ve had a little accident and maybe she could take me to the hospital because I rode my bike. After my conversation with Kris, neighbor Mike hits redial. He explains to Kris that he has never met me before, that maybe I am always this calm, but that he is pretty sure I am in shock and he would like to take me to the hospital immediately and maybe she could meet us there. He wrapped my head in a clean towel, put an ice pack on my shoulder, even ran over to my house to lock it up, I told him I thought my keys were in the den and then loaded me up to get to the emergency room.

On the way over to the hospital he asked what happened. I tell him what I think happened. He says he is pretty unlucky sometimes, too. He works as a private remodel contractor and has seen a few accidents. He shows me his hand that is missing a few sections of finger. I say so you’re kinda used to this sort of stuff. He looks at me and laughs and says, “Well no, not this exactly.” Kris meets us at the hospital and Mike passes me over to her expert care. Expert meaning that she has been my friend long enough that she knows I get injured a good deal and she can usually laugh about it with me and maybe a little bit at me. If you ever want to just blaze right through the emergency room the words to have your friend write on the form are “I am relatively sure that I hit my head and blacked out for a while.” Gets you in lightning fast.

Later, neighbor Mike stopped over to see how I was doing, to meet my husband and to let us thank him profusely. The three of us walked around the scene of the incident to piece it together. We glanced around the den, there was a lot of blood on the window, window frame and sill, but the window hadn’t broken. There were even etched marks in the glass where the ladder scraped, but did not break the glass. Most frightening is the mark right next to the window turn latch where my bloody unconscious head apparently whapped a second time, only a fraction of an inch from the window turn key latch.  We are all standing around marveling at how lucky I really was, how it could have been worse, how fortuitous it was that neighbor Mike was home on a weekday…when he looks down and says, “Have you been a painter long?” I say yes, that I am an artist, have been all my life. He points out that I put my brush back in the water (must have been during that successful second awakening). I say, “Well yeah, that’s 12 dollar trim brush, cuts in freehand on these old adobe walls like butter. It would have been a tragedy to ruin it.” Neighbor Mike laughs and says he’s pretty sure we’re going to get along fine.   

Lynn's Bio

I am enchanted by names. As talismans, they are pivotal in a hero’s quest, as eponymous adjectives, they rival pictures in descriptive power. As a precocious (my mother said “pert”) child, I labeled my chores Herculean and felt my efforts to charm or please my perplexed family Sisyphean.  I thought “quixotic” meant all the flavors of “curious”, or perhaps just “inexplicable” and didn’t realize until lately that there’s a certain level of fit there for me.

I was disappointed early on by the weakness of my own name. It alluded to nothing, no “elven-wise” as in Alfred, or “beloved of God” as in Benjamin. My limp offering for the acrostic name poem that teachers assign after the inevitable “summer adventures” essay would be: “Um… I’m Lynn….  and I’m (just so very) lucky… and I have yellow hair…. and… I’m new?” A trove of allusion lay hidden in my older siblings’ names: “Guy Duane” (pronounced initially in the French manner) and “Darcy Careen” and even more in the Civil War homage given to my seven years’ younger little sister, “Sheriden Leigh”.

My first name is not as richly elegant as my siblings’ but even so my family found it just a little too fancy for everyday use. It’s Annette, as in the Mouseketeer.  My being unmusical and unlikely to wear a bikini ever, I’d say any spell casting by the name fairy failed pretty fully. Even my parents sensed the lack of fit because I was “Lynn” from the first day home from the hospital. That fairy may be granted some small prescience: when I met my eventual sweetheart in high school, he spelled his last name—Finkelstein—to the tune of “Mickey Mouse.” I was amazed by that for years into our marriage until he pointed out that any name with eleven letters works).

The powerful names of the heroes of myth and legend were totems that drew me further into a mixed-up imagined world of Greece and Britain and Arabia. I lived entirely in Arthur’s Britain, Robin Hood’s Sherwood, and Aladdin’s lamp. I would hazily emerge from the lands of fable to find my mother had given up calling me to my list of chores and my sister was plotting revenge for having had to pick up the slack.

I tested myself with the didactic children’s classics even though I never fell into them as completely as my beloved fable and fantasy. Hans Christian Anderson would test my infant sense of justice with his devastating consequences of choice. Louisa May Alcott taught me to catalogue my flaws and those of others and I hoped, as observed of Demi-John as he fell asleep nursing a handful of popcorn kernels in Little Men, that my faults were of the better sort. Since I try not to be one of those who lie in their own journals (I wish I could remember what character said that of another; my memory is a slow accretion of literary bits and pieces without the possibility of attribution), I will admit that secretly I believed I had no faults. I was the pure and honest principal of every tale in every color of the Andrew Lang fairy books that I gorged on.

My obsession with fairy tales kept me in a middling state of moral and intellectual development: I would be rewarded for goodness and kindness, for patience and sacrifice. I can’t blame fairy tales alone, though, for my early and persistent belief that I could live in an imagined world. If I believed truly and tried purely, everything was possible said parents, teachers, Disney. I supplemented magic with a dogged but haphazard empiricism with Leonardo Da Vinci as my model.  His paintings were otherworldly, his illustrations of the natural world fantastical.  His being a left handed Virgo as I am was incidental to my emulation, just a pleasing lagniappe . Faith and faulty reasoning made me an endangered disciple. I observed slow moving desert reptiles and catalogued the insects inside and around our slump-block military housing unit. I mixed invisible inks and concocted love potions. I stared directly at the early morning sun on my way to school just to see how long I could do so before looking away. I wanted to soar like a bird but before attempting flight, I tried swimming—and breathing—like a fish. I’d been told there was oxygen in air and a little less in water. I assumed the percentage was the crucial difference, and I just had to try hard enough to breathe underwater. After my mother hauled me choking and spluttering out of our backyard vinyl pool, I accepted that if the lack of gills mattered so much, the absence of wings might more, and I’d best foster a facility for dream-flight.

Partly by inclination and partly through circumstance, science fiction was the natural next step in my literary evolution. The public library on Davis-Monthan, the Air Force base where my father was stationed, had a small children’s room, but most of the collection was tailored to the young airmen who were its primary clientele. My previous aimless and unsuccessful experimentation had pushed me away from the hard sciences, and in intermediate school I immersed myself in the social science fiction of Robert Heinlein, Ursula LeGuin and Roger Zelazny. Fantasy was inter-shelved with science fiction in that tiny library. After discovering and devouring the four volumes of Tolkien, I read them over and again more than ten times straight, and refused to believe there were no more. I checked out books on the “T” shelf with similar titles by other authors hoping they would prove to be sequels. This led to some unusual discoveries, and raised eyebrows from the librarians, who had given up shooing me back into the gaily-decorated room with the shelves of Bobbsey Twins and The Five Little Peppers.

From my tweens through teens, I continued to marinate in genre fiction mixed with 19^th century British and Russian classics. My taste broadened to include contemporary novels, and the discovery of magical realism bolstered my sense that reality was really quite flexible. (It did seem as if I was reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in real time, that one was a little chewy).  I married early, and my young husband learned early, as my family had earlier, that it was difficult to get my attention. Possibly thinking that it was easier to join me than change me, he proposed that we read aloud in the evenings. Not yet out of our teens, we adopted the Spanish custom of reading Don Quixote on the threshold of adulthood, anticipating a second reading at the beginning of maturity, and a third time at  at the onset of old age. When we read it that first year in the summer heat in our Quonset hut just off campus, the framed stories from Spanish folklore reminded us of tales also told by Shakespeare and Boccaccio. At forty, it seemed to us to be Sancho’s book. We laughed at his willing seduction by the promise of wealth and admired his earthy wisdom.

We have come now a little early to the third life-stage reading at the present milestone of my retirement from librarianship. Modern technology promises us a protracted old age, so we intend to add a fourth reading in time. In this third trip to medieval Spain I find I have a certain something in common with Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance. Don Quixote was convinced of the verisimilitude of the fanciful. I am generally aware of the here and now, but am not overly attached to it. Lost in contemplation, I can end up in Ajo on the way to the store. The Knight spent his days wholly in the adventures his creator designed for him. I lose time and space dreamily reflecting on those in all the books I have lived in for fifty years. The ingenious gentleman and I both wander through and around reality.

Cas' Bio

Biographies and introductions are a consistent challenge for me. So much so, that I perceive it must be for everyone. Whenever I have to introduce two people to each other, I try to include information that I know about each of them that might be of interest. My hope is to alleviate that uncomfortable pressure of them having to say something about themselves; or worse, having to ask one of those awkward questions that we really have no interest in having the other person answer. “So, you live in Tucson, huh?”, “What did you say your name was again?”, “Have you tried the dip?”… ugh, brutal. So, when my fellow Women Without Tangible Filters and I started discussing our introductions, that’s kind of where my brain went… to all the little random facts that create the composite of me, things that perhaps you could use to introduce me at a party, like…    

1. I have been employed (often at multiple jobs) as an Activist (Environmental and Social), a Bartender and Bouncer, a Chimney sweep at an industrial bakery (worst job EVER!!!), a Drawing instructor, an Editor, a Farmhand, a Glaze mixer in a ceramic studio, a House management supervisor, an Illustrator for medical textbooks, a Jewelry designer, a Kindergarten teacher, a Lifeguard, a Motion picture delivery person (on a motorcycle!!), a Newspaper delivery girl (this and babysitting were my first jobs) , an Old ale brewer (I brew lots of ales, but I needed an “O”), a Painter, a Quilter, a Retail manager of a bead store, a Swimteam coach for Tadpoles (the name of the youngest swimteam, not juvenile frogs), a Textbook researcher, a Union communications liaison (between auto workers and environmentalists!!), a Voice actor in radio ads, a Witch in Hell (a role I played for a production of the DreamGuild Theater), a Xylophone player, a Youth counselor, and a Zodiac illustrator. That's right, every letter of the alphabet and only one occupation is a lie (and I've done it, I just wasn't paid to do it)!
2. My husband Mike is the most amazing musician and should be the most famous musician on the planet.
3. My son Thackery is the happiest person I have ever met, and he makes me laugh hysterically daily.

4. I am slowly attempting to convert my entire wardrobe to purple clothing so I will no longer have to match my outfits.
5. I secretly believe most people have been programmed to lack empathy.
6. Not enough people put their art in the world.
7. I believe in angels.
8. I hope that there is a plan larger than the human existence and unknowable to our tiny peon brains.
9. I regularly read at least 7 books at a time. The first book I ever read was The Life and Times of Jack London. I was three, it took me months and it introduced me to individualism, adventure, socialism, bohemianism and naturalism, as well as an understanding that reading is the blood of life.
10. My love of reading has taken a very Billy Pilgrim role in my life. As a young child I read very adult themed books, Slaughterhouse Five and everything else by Kurt Vonnegut, The Diary of Anne Frank, everything by Jack London (but Star Rover is still my favorite), Willa Cather, Leo Tolstoy, J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories over and over, Aldous Huxley, James Baldwin,…my grandparents library was large and full of classics and I read them all. As I grade school student I read fantasy fiction my favorites were by J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and I became fascinated by their friendship and everything to do with The Inklings. I also started my lifelong love of Jane Austen at that age. All through high school and college I read every poet and philosopher I could find insatiably.  As a 43 year old who does a convincing job most days of being a grown-up, I have found my true love, the one that when done well combines great poetry, great art, meaningful philosophy and very adult themes…children’s literature.

11. Every day offers us multiple opportunities to make our world and our future better.
12. One way to do that is by changing cocktail recipes to strictly alcoholic ingredients. Cream? Ha, Bailey's. Pomegranate juice? Ha, pomegranate vodka. Really, put some effort into this people. There's even a Starbucks liqueur now so, no need for mere coffee in your Irish coffee anymore!
13. I refuse to EVER eat iceberg lettuce.
14. I am writing a novel and I think I am way too old to be publishing my first novel.
15. I think most Americans would stop buying new television sets if they saw the vile conditions in which the children of the families who build them are forced to live.
16. In the quite unlikely event that I ever do anything worthy enough to have a biography written about me; I hope it's titled, "I Have a Theory."
17. I do not have enough time in a day to make all the art I want to, that fills my dreams and haunts my consciousness; including illustrating the children's books that I have written.
18. When I am suffering from melancholy I read Calvin and Hobbes until I feel better (and I mean the Bill Watterson cartoons, not the theological and political philosophers).
19. I value the love of my family and friends above everything else in life.
20. I am confident that all our body parts were not intended to make it to the finish line. My grandmother shared this with me and recommended that I practice becoming unattached (pun intended).
21. The overwhelming beauty of the colors of Tucson take my breath away at least once a day.
22. Children are the greatest teachers and our only connection to the source of truth.
23. Some days a giant plate of super spicy Huevos Rancheros with a Café Cubano is all you need to know about the gifts of the universe.
24. When I grow up I want to "wear pajamas in the daytime."
25. Pukka what you practice.