“I hope you’re not wadding,” she said.

Here is a list, far from exclusive, of things that aggravate me: people on cell phones behind the wheels of cars; vomit; I cannot stand pudding, at all, and other things that fall in that category include meringues and Cool Whip; individuals who misuse (or use at all) the conveyor belts in line at the grocery store, except when absolutely necessary; and cheap toilet paper.

Again, this is far from an exclusive list.

The original Michelangelo.

Of the things listed above, several have affected me in the last 24 hours.

Last night I dreamed I couldn’t quite get up this rather large hill. It was exhausting, and I couldn’t catch my breath to get further than halfway up it. I was very disappointed in myself, in my dream, as I consider myself to be in rather pristine health. I woke up this morning, and there laying acoss my chest was Max, all 100+ pounds of him.

As a dog, I love him, as someone to sleep with – he may kill me.

I pushed him off my chest so as to ward off the complete suffocation, and he jumped off onto the floor, and vomited.  There are few more unpleasant sounds in this good, green world than that of vomiting. It seems even more tragic when it’s an animal. Even one who has tried to kill you as you slept.  And let’s not overlook what we’re all thinking: had I not woken up in time…(gross, right?)

Of course, the truly awful part is that you know it isn’t going to clean itself. I was less compassionate when I saw it consisted mainly of leaves from the backyard. Why he insists on eating them is beyond me. Ya Ya used to tell me that animals knew when they were sick and they’d traipse off to the woods to find certain leaves to expunge their stomachs.

None of that vital knowledge, though, made the clean-up any faster or easier. In fact, it just aggravated me.  (But god bless, Amanda. But hey, before you say another word – remember – it is her dog, after all).

Then, came the grocery store incident. Which I will recall for you, here, in some detail:

When I’m at the grocery store, which is one of my absolute favorite activities, as you may as well know right out – it’s one of the few pure joys I have in my life. I love to take my time and touch all the products. I’m very haptic, as I’ve pointed out, I’m sure. I like to touch the loaves of bread and the fruit glaze packages (though I’d never, ever allow that to come within 100 feet of my mouth). There’s just something so delicious about the weight of objects.

And, without a doubt, I’m a full-fledged member of the Reads the Complete Ingredients List. I like to know what’s going in my body. I wasted a lot of years on junk food. It’s going to take a long time to clean all of that out.  (Maybe I should go in to the backyard with Max, one afternoon and learn a few things).

But, the real aggravation comes when I’m putting my groceries on the counter/conveyor belt, and I only do this when I’ve got more groceries than I can carry in my arms, and the clerk is with another customer, but she insists on using the belt, you know, that moves your groceries down to her so she can run them across that red sensor light that never ceases to make me think of the End Times and Armageddon, and “check” their bar codes, are you still with me?

And you? What are you doing? Just trying to keep all your groceries together, that’s all.  At least that’s what I do because I’m extremely OCD about holding all of my groceries together. I like to make a little family unit out of them: the mayonnaise is always the Daddy, but I can’t very well do that because she won’t turn the blame thing off…and so before I can help it, my Daddy Mayonnaise is rolling down the other side to the bags (they sit at the end of the conveyor belt), and my onions will not sit still – I should have never expected them to – I can’t even think about what I’m gonna do with the 2-liter Fresca, bubbling up in retaliation right in front of my very face.  

Trust me. She's in no hurry.

It’s a madhouse, and she, this cashier, is completely unconcerned about it…the woman in front of me is just getting Cool Whip and cat litter but now she’s got two of my tomatoes and a loose jar of peanut butter hurtling themselves toward her 10-lb. bag of Purse like they’re old lovers reunited after a lengthy hospital stay due to a specific type of surgery like a bladder retacking that went a little awry (but would fix itself in a matter of 5-6 weeks, tops), and I’m trying to be cool about it, like It’s ok, I’ll get the tomatoes, I’ll fix this in just a few minutes, but you don’t say anything because that would make the entire situation too awkward, but she’s more than ready to announce to the cashier, that, No, these aren’t my items. I’m not paying for these rogue tomatoes. And you’re forced to make a little smile about it, and apologize.

You should never have to apologize at a grocery store, for anything.

You really shouldn’t even have to explain one single, solitary thing, at a grocery store. All you’re wanting is for the clerk to turn the damn belt off so that, unlike everyone else in the world, I, at least, could keep my groceries with me!  Am I on the belt?  Yes.  But, it’s because I can’t hold all my groceries with me. Do I want the belt to move? No, I do not. Not for Cool Whip and cat litter. I can’t help that I’m on the belt, ok.  I have some items that are too fragile for the journey, namely my eggs. Maybe she could switch it to a lower speed? More than anything it’s just embarrassing.

But, she doesn’t care, the clerk.  Nope.  She just flips that little switch and conveys everything to kingdom come.

And that…that is something that irritates me. That aggravates me.

That, and, cheap toilet paper.

Which I purchased day before yesterday at Walgreen’s. The store that you go to when you’re less than perfect. (I still don’t really agree with the concept of that commercial).

A lot of things happened to me as a small child, and they were upsetting and scarring and are now par for the course in my blogging life. Case in point: I was nine years old, and Aunt Ruth had come to stay for a interminably lengthy period at U.L.’s. Several people did that after Tigi died; she was U.L.’s mother and Aunt Ruth’s sister. I suppose it was her turn. I can’t remember that part.

She was a darner, though, that I remember and well. She darned from morning until night. When she finally went back home, the house was littered with plastic five-sided tissue boxes that she’d darned together with bright red yarns and pink shimmer yarns. Tissue boxes for every size of container. They are still at U.L.’s house because to move them would have been to insult her, and now that she, too, has passed on, it would be adding insult to injury (even though, I consider these “darn” tissue boxes to be a great injury), to touch them and move them.

Instead, they sit on the backs of toilets and on bedside tables collecting dust, which yarn does very well. Maybe that was the real gift Aunt Ruth was giving us.

Good at collecting dust.

I can still see this day-in-question as clear as a bell (whatever that actually means); the day I became afraid of bathrooms.

I’d thought Aunt Ruth was asleep, taking a nap the way well-behaved old people should, and I had gone to use the bathroom because my stomach was full. I was a nervous, private child at U.L.’s. It was mostly like living in a museum with Jesus’s kid brother. That kind of intense, reverent ambience. You did things quietly at U.L.’s.

Except Aunt Ruth, on this particular occasion.

Out of a dead sleep, I guess, she rose, and quickly. I was just about to wipe. I had torn several 2-ply pieces of toilet paper to assist me in this process when the bathroom door swung up to reveal my small frame on the procelain toilet to Aunt Ruth and the rest of the house – which was empty, yes, but that’s beside the point.

“I hope you’re not wadding,” she said.

“Ma’am?”

“Never wad. It’s wasteful. Fold, Kris. Tear off a few pieces, at a time, and fold. Like this.”

The demonstration was embarrassing enough. Having to show her that I understood what she meant has so seared itself into my conscience that unless I die in the bathroom, and can somehow alert you to that fact on my “way down”…I always go alone to the bathroom, whether it’s a stomach problem, a shower, or I’m brushing my teeth; I cannot share a bathroom. I am simply too scarred to correct that behavior.

I have no doubt that she did what she did with the best of intentions.

But, it has left me with a complex that I’m not entirely sure the DSM IV has been made aware of; if and when they do become aware of it, I’d be flattered if they named it after her. I’d be the first to sign the petition. I still get anxious in my own bathroom. My hygienic sanity is worn and frail, and barely hangs on by a thin string when I’m at my own house, let alone in public.

God, I can’t even think about public restrooms.

Oh, you know, wait, to be fair, I shouldn’t say it hangs on by a thin string. It’s much more like a piece of yarn.

Yeah, that’s better. Don’t you think?

A nice, red, shimmering piece of yarn.

That’s what I meant.

Rasputin and the Fateful Finger Day

I: Confession

I don’t have many great qualities, I’d imagine (for instance, I find it increasingly difficult to even get a date, so I’m tempted to say that I must be lacking some crucial quality – unfortunately, it’s a temptation I never give into. I know better).

What I do have, and consider a good thing to have, is a large, uncontrollably malleable heart. Even if it’s quite a fault of mine to have it, a liability.

It’s still not the worst thing to have.

Attention: Will Robinson and The Clever Kris

Then, again, I’m also ignorant about a great many things, and most often, after the initial shock of owning so much pathos, I tend to hole away again into my own, insular world.  So, no loss is ever that greatly overwhelming, except death, antithetical cliches, and poorly played tennis matches. (i.e., a missed dating opportunity, small potatoes; a grocery store out of small potatoes when I want potato salad, devastating).

I know it’s not going to come across this way, upfront, my big heart, etc. in today’s blog, perhaps…since, one of the two kittens in question attacked Amanda, the other day, sending her to the fate of a Tetanus shot, but “hold off the earth” your criticism, for awhile, to paraphrase the Bard.

What you should know, first, about the cat attack: Max, the dog, was let into the backyard, which is his backyard, and there, underneath the last step, were two kittens, kittens that had appeared from nowhere but out of the calm green grass, and there they were sitting, the two kittens, as was told to me, like a planned lolcat photo op, by the bicycle.

Max, of course, immediately fell under the impression that he’d been given the greatest gift of all: toys that were alive with fur and embedded noisemakers, like his stuffed polar bear. Amanda barely rescued one kitten from his vice-like jaws; this is the kitten that bit her so maliciously on her pinkie…and maybe, we’re not sure, somehow on her wrist.  

The other “kitteh” got away…and, we thought, would stay there.

Amanda, whose heart is, admittedly, only slightly larger than mine, due to a misshapen left aorta, I believe, (that’s what I tell myself) took the helpless, strikingly demoralized kitten to the Vet School, here on campus. I must say, here and now: I find it rather ironic that several blogs back I was bragging about the stewardship of this school and program, and yet, here they were, unwilling to assist; they wouldn’t help Amanda at all. Not really.  

Instead, she was referred to another veterinarian’s office; he was also irate.  Not at her, but at their inability to offer the very assistance they should be offering in order to better learn their craft. What few options they gave Amanda were ridiculously expensive.  That, or, euthanization. 

I was, then, via proximity of incident and the ridiculously-expensive-options only rule, irate as well.

This other vet, though, has done the right thing, mostly, in my opinion. He has been nursing this ravaged kitten ever since that Fateful Finger Day. He called yesterday to say several things:  1) the hole in the kitten’s side had healed; 2) his lung had reconstituted and his diaphragm was not, after all, damaged; 3) he had finally decided he was hungry enough to eat; 4) the quarantine was in effect and working well; and 5) when would be taking him home, please?

Amanda said, Well, could you put a collar on him and perhaps, neuter, him, first, and then we’d bring him home and go from there.

The vet said that it would take 10-14 days post-quarantine before he could neuter the poor, feral, pure evil, vicious, frightened, intimidated feline that we’d taken already, around the house, to calling, affectionately, Rasputin. The tone of his voice said more than enough. Neuter him on our own time.

He’s been poked, needled, fed, stitched, prodded and watered, the vet continued. He’d also bitten a vet assistant who had attempted to pet him.

I’m pretty sure I think I love this kitten.

I’m not sure, however, what will happen to him, even after we bring him home, as we’ve all but flat-out decided to do that.  If nothing else,I reasoned, our house was where his people were, right? It might give him a better leg-up to return to his homeplace and start from scratch here. It made sense to me.

There were several kittens under there, originally, and for safety’s sake, we called the Humane Society; our neighbor has a crackhouse of cats, apparently. The congregate, they do their “drugs,” they kill a few birds, no cockroaches, though, I should point out, and they hang around in the yard, all damn day and night.

The Humane Society, like cats themsevles, came, in the still of the night, apparently, because all the kittens were gone the next morning. Sigh. Of course…he has no people now.

Or, so, we thought…

…until last night, when I was taking a much deserved bath, propping my sore ankle over the side of tub to let it wrap itself in steam. The other kitten, the one we thought had run away, seems to have come back; it’s like, almost right out of the Bible – 99 sheep lay down to sleep, or whatever, but one wanders off and you really only want the one that went away.  (This is my version of that shepherd story because truth be known, I worried sick about that other kitten, the Houdini). To me, he was the one that stayed awake, and aware, and wandered off…to live. (He’ll have the best stories, if he ever comes back). Prodigal as his nature is, he did. So, I said, he must belong to me.

He gets by with a little help from his friends.

I kept hearing this tiny meow, as I lay steaming in the tub, but I refused to think that one had been left behind. I convinced myself that this was the one that had returned. I couldn’t bear thinking he’d been overlooked. How lonely that would feel. I know. 

No, no, he must be the one that left and returned, I mean, how could they have overlooked a kitten, I kept saying over and over to myself. 

The next thing I knew, I’d said it over and over to myself so many times that I was crawling underneath the house, fresh from my bath, at midnight last night, searching him/her out. I couldn’t stand that pitiful mewing. I would never get a night’s rest with that awful, plaintive cry for love and affection. Especially not when I have these arms, so eager to love and affect. It’s odd, but we do that to the sound of a cat’s meow, much more than a dog’s bark, I think: we personify it. It just sounds too “of the depth”, too doleful, too Mahalia Jackson.

I care for animals sometimes more than I do for people. I have yet, however, to trace that root down. I think it must have happened when I decided to love animals more than people.

Sometimes.

I searched forever, and I couldn’t find it, that poor kitten. We decided to leave it food, water, and a lantern for a more fine dining atmosphere. It seems to have done the trick. At least, it’s grown quiet.

And, so, I’ll do my best to do the same as soon as I get these cobwebs and dead crickets out of my hair. I’ll just run another bath, quickly, and say a little prayer.

That’s right, Annelle, I pray.

II: Addendum

I came back from class, today, and as promised, went outside to check on that kitten, I’ve named him Houdini Pip, both for his disappearing act and also because poor Pip, in Great Expectations, just couldn’t stay out of trouble, could he?  Also, I wasn’t against using a file and a pork pie to lure my shackled robber out of the fog of the house foundation. It is plain filthy under there.

I peered under the house, and the lantern was gone. I stood silently in the dead heat of 92 degrees, but I heard no mewing issue forth when I called for him.

The water had been touched, though, and some of the food had been eaten. I was elated. Let him stay under there if he wants, I used to crawl under the house all the time when I was a little kid, much to the chagrin of everyone else. So long as he eats, he’ll be fine. And that’s what it appeared he’d done: eaten, at least a little of the food.

Amanda, ironically, I realized then, had not asked me to meet her anywhere for lunch. That’s when I g0t a little worried.

I ain't no Ingrid Bergman.

What if she’s taken to eating cat food? I fear that would not bode well for the future of groceries in our home.

This is how I stress: What if she’s just moving the food around in that bowl because she knows how neurotic I am about stray animals and someone loving them, and by so moving the food, she’ll think that I’ll assume the kitten’s being taken care of, because that’s exactly what I’d think.

If any of that’s true, then all I can say is this: that’s one hell of a gaslight.

But, I know better. After all, the lantern we used takes batteries.

Every gas station in Georgia is like a mini-casino.

I was ready to go the minute I woke up. For two reasons: I was ready for a road trip, first of all; also, I’m rather moody, and I am completely helpless about it.  One second I’m the life of the party, and the next, I want a small closet with no windows and a fur coat to roll around in, and a really filthy martini in an oversized glass without the garnish unless they stuff the olives with blue cheese.

I guess I get it from my mother’s side.

We were coming to Atlanta for a wedding.  Well, actually I was coming to Atlanta; I wasn’t attending the wedding, which was, at the last minute, occurring three hours north of Atlanta, in the tiny western corner of North Carolina, and three more hours was simply not on my list of Things I’d Like to Add To My Day On the Road.  I had elected to stay at the hotel, alone, despite the fact that the room is on the 5th floor and I don’t do heights well, not even 5th floor heights.

We’d decided the day before, during our “dialogue,” that we weren’t going to let time dictate this adventure, short as it was; no, we were going to simply let things unfold, play with several decks of cards, maybe even throw a hand of Skip Bo in there, you know, whatever – fill in with your favorite cliche, the point still holds.

And, immediately, we were denied this. 

We overslept, first of all, which I’m still having trouble wrapping my mind around as we had never set a definite departure time, but somehow, you can always manage to oversleep.  You know it, your mind knows it, your body knows, your uncle who’s already called fifteen times to find out “where on the road you are” knows it.

And, as is our way, the first item of business was correcting an oversight: Max.

He’d been completely overlooked; he had to be boarded which is about as close to his favorite thing on God’s green earth as having your tongue ironed, with a whole can of Faultless Starch sprayed on it first. Of course, you just don’t know the definition of chaos until you take an anxious White German Shepherd to a vet’s office, which was eerily like a normal doctor’s office with the exception of the magazine selection, and then you try and convince him to make nice with the other dogs as well as the thousand plus smells of previous dogs and other wildlife who had also been boarded, smells that permeate suspiciously unknown in that secret olfactory dog world (though believe me, there’s plenty your own nose can pick up)…suffice it to say, Max doesn’t do this well.  He doesn’t like change.  How Mississippian of him.

Sugar, the cat, on the other hand, couldn’t care less if you lived or breathed so long as she had food and you gave up and let her drink from the dog bowl, instead of her own.  I guess it’s her way of being mean. (She has more than one way, though – it’s especially fun when she eats his food, which he lets her do, because she’s allergic to it and her bottom lip swells out, pink and tender.  It even muffles her ability to meow, and so I laugh at her because she knows better, but I also help her as I’m not entirely heartless where animals are concerned).

The secretary at the vet’s, God bless her, was less than enthused with absolutely everyone who brought in an animal. I couldn’t imagine why she stayed at such a job if it made her miserable, and passive-aggressive. Then I remembered the enconomy and so naturally I had to create a long backstory about how her husband had left her for a younger man (I mean, let’s make it interesting, ok), and she was devastated and had only been a housewife all these years, and a good mother, to her three children, all of whom hated her because she was selfishly unstylish and too strict about church, and again, passive-aggressive. She drove a mint-green Geo Prism, a gift to herself after her husband left, and when she re-entered the workforce (one she’d never actually entered), it took her begging a friend to speak on her behalf to the veterinarian, which worked because the said friend was having an affair with the veterinarian, and so to keep the peace, and his marriage, he gave her the job. And she took a not-too-small delight in expanding her passive-agressiveness as a way of “getting back” at the cheating veterinarian, projecting her own anger about her husband’s infidelity onto each of his clients.

I mean, come on, a mint-green Geo Prism? 

She announced, more than once, to each person who came in that the wait was going to be long because some people had made appointments at the last minute (i.e., we did) and as they weren’t regularly scheduled, whatever that meant exactly, it had added to the backlog; also, all the vets were in a dental lab until noon, so only the vet techs were available to handle boarders.

It was at this point, that for the first time in my life, I found a need to read Cat Fancy, a magazine for the lonely and sexually frustrated if ever there was one. Max evenutally just had to be taken outside, so great was his angst and energy, specifically at the Brittany Spaniel, named Gus, who I think just really wanted a new pal. I bet if dogs were sent off to war, they’d return with greater compassion for each other. What dogs need, I think, is a good, long war story, a survival of the trenches sort of story.  That would really make them bond, I think. But, unfortunately, we’re Democrats now, so we may never know.

After waiting what felt like a day, we finally managed to hand Max over, much to his chagrin and whining, and get on the road.  The weather held. The ride wasn’t painful. And then we needed gas.

Every gas station in Georgia is like a mini-casino.

I’m not even a little bit kidding. I knew the lottery was offered in this heathen state but I wasn’t aware of how the gas stations were designed, per se.  I didn’t like the layout. My biggest reason for this is because when I go to the bathroom, I actually prefer, to the point of enjoying, my privacy there.

The men’s restroom at this particular Quik Jak, or whatever it was called, had a very unique design: first, there were no doors, just a large white bricked entranceway, with a sink smack-dab in the middle (if you didn’t wash your hands on your way out, Cigarette Sally and her fourth husband and everyone else in this less than green part of creation would know). That’s never a problem for me, as I am bit obessive about hand-washing especially with the you know what circling the globe. (It amuses me that they’ve changed the name H1N1 to save the pigs, as if we could forget the fact that we’ve called it swine flu 24-7 for a solid blame month. Amanda says it’s not for the pigs, but the people, and something about Egypt and the slaughter of the 300,000. She’s like a Mother Theresa/Arianna Huffington hybrid, that one).

I always find the bathroom first, when in gas stations, because I’m not there to talk to the people. But at this gas station, “talk to people” was all I wanted to do. In the back, there were ten or eleven long tables set up, and they were packed with people. I thought it was an extension of the restaurant, but no:  they were bingo tables, and they had squatters. I hadn’t fully understood it until I turned the corner at the end of the chips/chocolate/quick-fix tire foams/jewelry aisle and found myself in front of one of the three tv screens whose sole purpose in this world was to broadcase HDTV Bingo. Words were exchanged, I realized my costly mistake and then turned around and there was the open entrance to the bathroom. Twelve seconds tops; almost a record for urinal discovery…plus, the excitement of disrupting a Bingo game…and not a priest in sight of the lot of them, either.

Both her age and her Bingo.

On my way out, I quickly scooted past the Bingo-ers and found myself in the middle of this treacherous Gamble-Land, beside an elderly couple, and tall, bright orange and yellow booths.  Each of the aged couple had canes and a slight lean, a lean that I think was attached literally to a quarter slot game of some indeterminable skill: it involved dropping quarters into the machine, cursing, convincing themselves to do it “one more time,” and then stuttering on their loose legs out the front door.

Obviously, with such bells-and-whistles stimulation, I could hardly ignore the temptation. I bought several scratch-off cards and like a squirrel, twittered back to the car to find a lucky nickel. (Also, I just joined the actual Twitter online phenomenon, but I was using the above form of “twitter” as an actual verb).

I won $15. 

Gambling saved the morning, deep breaths were taken, the thrill of scratching anything off with a nickel was soundly recognized and appreciated and we took off to master the last 35 miles left to the city of Atlanta.

And, believe it or not, after several missed exits, our humors were restored completely and kept in check. We found the hotel and in our rooms, a deep sunken whirlpool tub plus an additional glassed-in shower, and a doorbell. (And of course, in the closets bathrobes for each guest). I was ecstatic. I’m wearing it right now. I love a bathrobe.

All that and my big win of $15…

…which is, ironically I discovered, the exact price of a martini here.

If I were looking at someone right now, I’d make my conspiracy eyes. As it is, I guess I’ll just go sink down into the tub and read some more.

Sigh.