Old Married Couple

Jack, watching as our son pulls his car into the driveway: "That's David. He must just be getting home."

Me: "Thank you, Captain Obvious!"

Jack: "You're welcome, Captain Smart Ass!"

Me: "Guilty as Chaaarged."

Left Brain/Right Brain

Like many people who are brilliant with technology and numbers, Jack is not great at spelling. (I admit that sometimes the simplest of words look strange to me as well.) Therefore, he sometimes uses me as a call-in dictionary.

"Hello?"

"Spell 'characterization.'"

I'll spell it, he thanks me, and says good-bye. I've had some strange looks if people are in the house when I answer the phone, spell a word, and then hang up.

The other day he said, "Spell 'something.'"

I asked, "Anything?"

Sorry. Couldn't resist.

Merci Beaucoup!

On Monday, Jack left for France and I dragged myself out of bed to let Max, my 13-year-old golden Lab out the back. He had been for his full check-up last month and the vet and all involved commented on what a beautiful dog he is and how fit for his age. But when I opened the door, counting in my head the things I needed to do that forced me to put my reluctant two feet on the floor, I noticed that Max’s two hind paws were listing to the side. He stepped off the deck and veered sidewise into the woods. I can’t even recount the thoughts that went through my head as I stood momentarily frozen, but most of them culminated in “Oh God, please no.”

One day, if I can ever bear it, I’ll try and put down in words the feelings I have for that old dog. He has been arrested several times and could win the pain-in-the-ass award for Dogdom. One day, after many years of living with and complaining about Maximus mischief and with me arguing for the defense, Jack, in a fit of rage, threatened to take my yeller feller out in the woods and shoot him. I calmly told him that if he ever did so to pack his bags and not look back. It was the end of the conversation. Would Jack ever do it? Probably not in a million years, but to me it isn’t something to talk about—killing one of your own. And that’s what Max is to me.

Anyway, I walked out after him into the woods in my pajamas and no shoes, calling him as he fell and struggled up again, trying to help him up, guide him toward the door. He staggered and vomited. The wind was blowing and I couldn’t lift a 100-pound–plus dog, but he kept getting up. I knew then, as I know now, that if I started crying, I might never stop. I had to call David from college, an hour’s drive away, to come and help me lift Max into the car. I felt guilty pulling David out of class but I was desperate.

Examinations and $300 worth of blood tests later, they told me that if Max had suffered a stroke not much could be done. His eyes were jumping around, disabling his balance. They gave me antibiotics and ear drops with the hopes that he had an inner ear infection. I brought my laptop upstairs because I discovered that an article I thought was due at the end of the week was due the next day. Then, oh my gosh, the Sears repairman rang the bell to look at the dishwasher—another $150. Bad day at Black Rock. I waited for hours for David to get home so that I could go to the bathroom because Max tried to follow me as he always does and he kept falling. We placed the ironing board across the stairwell to stop Max from toppling down.

I didn’t sleep well, waiting for those blood tests and waking up to look at Max who was too dizzy to jump up on the bed with me. I’ll admit I just kept praying. Listen, if you can’t pray for a good old dog, then there’s something really wrong with you (in my humble opinion). He, on the other hand, slept well. Next day the vet called to say that the blood tests all looked fine and the medicine seems to be working well enough that Max is ornery about the eardrops, walking steadily, and smiling in his sleep. I know I can’t keep him much longer, but sometimes the plusses of a few extra days, hopefully months or years, make you very grateful for small favors.

Meanwhile, after sharing the details with Jack over e-mail, he wrote me back that he couldn’t call because of the expense. I wrote him back that those corporate assholes could pay for one friggin’phone call. (Pardon my French.)

Beauty Day

Some sound advice: never give a semi-agoraphobic, claustrophobic, with social anxiety the gift of spa treatments unless you truly despise that person. I can make this statement because I (fitting the aforementioned description) was given such a dreaded gift on a “significant” birthday by my husband who was acting on the advice of sister, Jennifer. And he spent a bundle on it: a day trip to Chateau Elan, a spa with expensive packages of treatments I’d never heard of, and equally expensive a la carte tortures. As usual, Jack, the well-meaning but misguided man, was out of town when I received the prize in the mail. I immediately called the ringmaster of the event and asked her, “How could you do this to me?”

“I thought you’d like it!” she lamented. (No, she likes these things, not I.)

“Do you not even know me after all these years?!”

“I thought it would be relaxing for you.”

“What are you kidding me?!”

“Maybe you can get your money back. If not I’ll go with you.”

“Oh yes, oh yes you will.”

Well guess what, the Chateau had a no-refunds policy that I couldn’t beg, borrow, or steal my way out of. I didn’t want to hurt Jack’s feelings but this was beyond the pale. I managed to avoid the punishment almost through to my next birthday, when the package would expire. So after much ado, sister and I headed for the spa, in the dead of winter, a two hour trip that turned into a much longer one because of a serious accident that blocked the expressway. “This is a sign,” I warned, but Jennifer was not turning back.

They had valets . . . oh the horror, a greeter at the door (oh the humanity), and one of those smooth-faced hostesses who had never had a real facial expression in her life, with the exception of that I-know-you-don’t-belong-here look in her eyes. (She was right of course.) We were issued sandals, a locker key, and the requisite white fuzzy robes. We entered the women’s area and went into the dressing rooms. Soon I was knocking on the wall adjacent to Jennifer’s dressing area, attempting to use prison lingo for what the hell am I supposed to do now? Do I put my bathing suit on under the robe? Do I try to make a run for it? Tap, tap, tap. Does anybody have a shiv? Possibly I could hang myself with the robe belt.

“I’m going around the corner into the sauna,” Jennifer spoke slowly in her Nurse Ratched voice reserved for the mentally challenged. “Just put your things in your locker and meet me there.” It sounded easy enough, but I worked myself into a froth trying to open the locker and once that feat was accomplished, getting the thing locked again was equally as vexing. When I opened the sauna door and stepped inside, Jennifer and several patrons awaited me. Once again the nurse’s voice, “Gail, do you think you really need that in here?” I still had my purse. Dammit!

After some sauna stuff, which I didn’t need because I was already in a sweat anticipating the anguish to come, we moved on to a room where we waited to be called for our dreaded back massage and facial. “Oh God, please don’t let me have a guy,” I whispered frantically to Jennifer. “Why don’t you go over and get some water over at that table?” she suggested quietly to the blathering idiot beside her—that would be me. When I sat down with my ice water, she again asked me in the soothing voice, “Did you pour the water on top of the protective cup cover?”

“Is that what that is?” I replied, gazing down at the little plastic shower cap on my cup, half filled with water. A tan-in-January couple sitting across from us tittered. Then a woman in white called my name and introduced me to a male masseuse named Dom Perignon or something. I couldn’t understand a word he was saying throughout the greasy massage ritual, but secretly hoped he’d just snap my neck like a twig and put me out of my misery. No, I did not relax. Next the crowning glory, the facial. A young woman took me into the morgue-like room awash with new age music and began doing her thing. She covered my eyes with gauze or something, put my hands in mitts, and again in that crazy don’t- use-your-vocal-chords voice said, “Now just relax. I’m going to be back in a few minutes. Just relax and enjoy.”

Enjoy what? This crappy music? The fact that I feel so slimy from that massage that I may squirt off this table? I reached up to scratch my nose and that’s when I made the terrifying discovery. She had attached my mitts together with a chord to keep my hands from sliding off the table during my fit of relaxation. Oh panic; not the hands, anything but the hands! (Well, not anything.) I started flailing around like a flounder on ice. I was blinded by cotton balls and my bound, mitted hands danced above my head in demented unison. I had to release my hands; had to escape! Finally a bit of reason prevailed. I told myself how embarrassed I would be if the facial girl came into the sanitarium, discovered that I had broken free of my mitts, and found me panting like one of Sybil’s alter egos crouched in the corner, my face slathered with goo. It took some doing, but I remained shackled until she returned. She immediately noted that my skin looked somewhat splotchy. Yes, that’s what abject fear looks like my pretty. Afterwards she led me to the room of mortification--beauty products, priced at 100 bucks an ounce. I took a rain check and tried to shrug off her open disdain. I stepped into the elevator with another patron and said, “Tell me which button to push to get out of this hellhole.” Oddly, she seemed surprised.

When we reached the escape portal, Jennifer said, “Thank God that’s over. I’ve never been so stressed in my life.”

Was it something I said?

Today, she told me that she is getting a massage for her birthday this weekend at a local spa. Hmm, I can’t help but wonder why she didn’t ask me to come along.

Feeling Taxed

It’s tax season and time to get involved in a full-fledged revolution. Months ago, I sent an e-mail to the ACLU asking them to represent me in a class-action lawsuit against the government for discriminatory tax policies. To my chagrin and astonishment, I haven’t heard from them. I just don’t understand why the entire middle class should continue to work like rats on wheels to fund free college tuition, etc. for the children of a growing population of people who are here illegally or to subsidize a government that regularly throws our hard-earned money down $1000 toilets. Therefore, tomorrow I am going to a Fair Tax Rally with friend, Jill, in downtown Atlanta. As a rule, I keep politics out of my blog rantings, but this adventure has potential hilarity written all over it.

I don’t have any poster board so I found an old Christmas box and wrote my original pithy saying on it: Middle-class taxation funds the nation! And we’re sick of it!” I showed it to my son. He said, “No good can come of this.” I don’t think he was referring to the cause, but rather to my involvement . . . in anything.

I asked my sister, Jennifer, to go, but she was too exhausted from her “relaxing” weekend in the Blue Ridge Mountains with Pit Bull Extraordinaire sister, Lynn (details later). She did make the helpful suggestion that Jill and I duct tape ourselves to something to make a political impact. I suggested that we duct tape ourselves to the master of ceremonies—Senator Saxby Chambliss. (Let’s face it; if you’re still alive after grammar school with a name like that, you must have something going for you.) I liked the idea of doing a dumb-and-dumber routine in which we duct taped ourselves to one another and shouted, “Yeah, what are you going to do about it?!” However, that routine would quickly lose its luster after being deserted in a questionably safe part of Atlanta (which is all of it) unable to extricate ourselves from the visual joke.

Jill suggested that she was reluctant to speak publicly,so if called upon by the media [yeah, that's going to happen] she would make hand gestures as though she were a deaf mute, and I could interpret for her. I told her if she did so, I would yell, "She says she has a gun! Get down! She's also strapped with explosives!"

When I told Jack (who is once again out of town) of our plans, he thought I was “pulling his leg” about our mission–-knowing me as the agoraphobic that I have come to be. However, deep down I knew that I must return to the city that was the ludicrous locale of many of my memorable memories. I attended college at Georgia State University, one of the coldest, harshest harbingers of city education that has ever existed in the universe and beyond. The last time I set foot there was to turn in a requisite dozen thick copies, a total of approximately eighty pounds, of my Master’s thesis, the result of enough years work to earn me three doctorates. (I was working and had a small child, but I finally completed it.)

Typical of the school’s caring nature, when I arrived soaked in my own perspiration to turn in my thesis on pornography, the cyborg in charge robotically informed me that I had to turn in my imminently deadlined copies to a different building. It was blocks away and in the ninety-plus-degree heat, I found myself trudging like the Cat-in-the-Hat, balancing parcels into the dregs of the city. Finally, to avoid a cult of nasty characters, I cut through an alley. There I squinted, panting heavily and leaning against a brick wall with my sweat-soaked stinking body grasping boxes filled with my pornography thesis copies in a dark environment along with a one-legged man in a wheelchair downing the last swill from a vodka bottle. Close to a heat stroke I dizzily thought “Yes, this is your perfect ending: found dead of heart failure with a one-legged alcoholic, buried amongst the flying pages of a pornography thesis with your name typed on every leaf.”

Miraculously, I actually survived this scene and found my location marginally ahead of deadline, though I know my odor painfully offended some elevator patrons. I came home with a bottle of champagne to celebrate, as my alley partner left me no choice but to find my own beverage. Jack asked, “What are we celebrating?”

So tomorrow, I will return to the scene of my almost tragi-comedic death. I might not make a difference in the world, but this time when I return to the venue of my torture, I swear that God as my witness, I will smell much better.