My Friend Annette

For some of us, the sun shone a little less brightly yesterday.

I got an email telling me that my dear friend, Annette Briley, had finally lost her battle to Lupus and Cancer. I can’t say that it was a real surprise, as I hadn’t heard from her in weeks and happened to think over the weekend that I needed to call and rag her about it.

Annette had a 20 year history of imposing “radio silence” on me whenever her health was in decline. I suspected that the lack of communication was a portent of what was soon to come.

Annette was one of those people that I met and with whom I instantly bonded. When we were first introduced in 1993, the year I moved to Lawton, Oklahoma, she became the caregiver for my parrots when I was out of town. From the start we could look each other straight in the eye and say what needed to be said, although I had to learn that role.

Annette and I seemed prone to adventure. We would start out on a day trip to Wichita Falls, TX, a mere 50 miles away, and return 12 hours later, 800 miles on the truck odometer and in great spirits. We used to joke that we’d drive 200 miles out of our way just to see the “world’s largest ball of string.”

Lupus is a cruel disease, sapping the energy from vibrant individuals. There were times that we’d be scheduled to go off for the day and she’d call to say she simply didn’t feel up to it. The first couple of times I let her get by with it. Then one day her husband, Richard, took me aside and said, “You know, when she says she’s too tired she really just needs someone to kick her butt to make her go. I have to live here and obviously can’t be the one to do that. You, however. . . . .”

That was it. I understood my charge and the next time she said she wasn’t up to the trip I told her I didn’t want to hear it and that she needed to be ready in an hour, lest I come over, select her wardrobe and draw her makeup on myself.

To a classy lady such as Annette, this was a serious threat. Her demand was that I have coffee with me when I arrived, and she’d get in the truck, grumbling and snarling for a good 5 minutes before she was over it. As the disease progressed we had to make some accomodations.

I always drove.

She sometimes napped in the afternoon, regardless of where we were. This wasn’t that big of a deal, though, since we’d been caught asleep in a parking lot or rest area after lunch if it’d been a particularly long day.

But it was always rejuvenating to be with her.

Annette’s husband, Richard, was a Lawton police officer and was a great guy, too. They had a wonderful relationship with a dance they did that simply astounded me the first time I saw it.

Richard came in one evening and she looked him dead in the eye and said, “Oh, good, you’re home. You’re going fishing / hunting / camping for a few days. I’ve already cleared the time off with the PD. Call me on Wednesday to see if you’re back on the schedule or not.”

Richard, recognizing that absence makes the heart grow fonder and the value of “separate time” for all couples, never blinked an eye. He knew that his opportunity would come in the future to look over his newspaper and ask, “When was the last time you went to Arkansas to visit your mom?” which was her clue to “un-ass the area” as Richard said.

A few years ago, Annette was struck with breast cancer on top of the Lupus. While I know there were times that she must have despaired, she rarely let it show to anyone else. Ever the voluptuous woman with a figure straight out of a Renaissance painting, the chemo and other treatments brought on significant weight loss.

Last time we talked, she laughingly told me that she now weighed roughly what her boobs did just a few years ago. “On the bright side, I can fit back into my prom dress from 1966, except this time I don’t have to stuff the bosom. This time I can just roll those puppies up where they’ve flattened out and tuck ‘em in. Instant 36D’s.”

Last time I saw her, I had to sneak up unannounced. She’d been dodging me for months and I’d decided it was time to force my way in when I was back in Oklahoma visiting, whether she liked it or not. I knew that she was dragging around an IV pole, mainlining antibiotics for several months because of some infection that simply wouldn’t go away. I suspected that she looked like hell and was sealing herself off from everyone, but if those who love you can’t see you at your worst and still love you, what’s the point?

Her daughter (who didn’t really know who I was) answered the door. When I asked to see Annette, she said that she wasn’t feeling well and seemed to think I was going to go away. I insisted, and finally asked if she’d give her mom my calling card.

Then I handed her a pound of butter.

You see, Annette had a bigger butter thing goin’ on than Paula Deen. She had at one point sent me to the store to bring back 5 pounds of butter, “just in case” because she thought she might do a bit of cooking that weekend.

I heard the laugh from her bedroom when her daughter gave it to her and we had our last meal together -- Annette, her daughter, our friend Lori and me. We got take-out from Wayne’s Drive In, a Lawton institution dating back to Annette’s childhood and purveyor of such delicacies as Frito Pie, Cheeseburgers, fried pickles and Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper, all of us sitting on her living room floor.

It was some of the finest dining I’ve ever done, and I wish we could do it again.

I wish her well on her journey to Richard, a Vietnam veteran and Lawton Police Officer who passed in 2007, his own cancer likely attributable to encounters with Agent Orange. I suspect, even though she died on Sunday, she hasn’t gotten there yet, though.

After all, in the great expanse of the Universe there must be even bigger “balls of string” to visit and see before you finally decide to call it a day and head home.

I hope that she has a hell of a journey, with all the detours she wants.

http://www.grayfuneral.com/CurrentObituary.aspx?did=34f83dd1-7d67-41ea-a3e1-3e4158947643

Spring Cleaning

So it’s springtime in the Carolinas.

Never mind that it’s here a few weeks early and there has been virtually no winter to speak of. The daffodils are up and blooming (at least in the neighbor’s yard) and my plans to wait until Valentine’s Day to transplant some small shrubs has to be moved up a few weeks. It’s springtime.

That also carries with it the idea that it’s time for Spring Cleaning.

I’m betting the concept of Spring Cleaning goes back to a time when houses were all closed up for the winter and things just got generally nasty and needed to be aired out. In a house that is on a 5 lane highway, I can tell you that there’s NEVER a time that we get to open the windows and air out the house. So we stay closed up all the time.

You reach a point, though, usually after (a) having to help clean out the house of someone who passed away or (b) after watching an episode of “Hoarders” on television and living in mortal fear of a camera crew showing up on your doorstep, that you simply have to address things.

We came up with the concept a couple of years ago of taking “one room a month” and cleaning it out entirely. Following that line of reasoning, the entire house would be cleaned out in about a year and a half, meaning that we could then rest on our laurels in a clean and uncluttered environment until the market comes back and we can move into our brand-spankin’-new dream condo that is on a single level, has windows that don’t let the wind whistle through and a crew that maintain both the yard and the pool.

It was a decent effort. It lasted two months, which is roughly three times longer than the average New Year’s Resolution for some of us. Then the decision to go back to school happened and the project got put on hold. During that time, we got the attic in pretty good shape, other than dealing with enough Christmas decorations to do the windows at Macy’s on any given year.

Anyone who’s ever lived with a person who is pursuing an advanced degree – especially when they’re writing their thesis / dissertation – knows that EVERYONE in the house is working on the project. It is absolutely a joint effort that puts everything else on hold. The only thing that I can imagine that might even begin to come close to equating this change in routine is a pregnancy / baby, and I have to rely on third party information for that comparison.

But even during graduate school life goes on, and sometimes you have to give the student a bit of space and occupy yourself. So with that in mind – and having seen an episode of Hoarders that hit close to home AND hearing this weekend’s edition of The People’s Pharmacy on OCD and hoarding (http://www.peoplespharmacy.com/2012/01/28/844-overcoming-obsessions/) it was obvious that the universe was sending me a sign that it was time to start again.

Plus, the dissertation surveys closed out this week and EB was glued to his computer analyzing data.

My decision was to tackle the kitchen, starting with the pantry. It had, since before the holidays, taken on attributes of Fibber McGee’s closet, and I suspected that the strange odor was a vagrant vegetable that had managed to set up its own ecosystem in there.

There are some things about an old house that are great. Our pantry is one. I’ve seen bathrooms that were smaller and, after I remodeled it a few years ago, it now has steel shelving that goes all the way up to the 10 foot ceiling, a fluorescent light that turns on with a switch (as opposed to the bare bulb hanging from a wire that we started with) and, if fully stocked, would completely feed us for several months.

That’s the theory, anyhow. The reality is that it becomes a jumble of things rarely used and assorted bits of flotsam and jetsam, the “real food” either being stored in the freezer or in another cabinet. The result is that things I’m going to use “someday” when I make “insert name of impossibly complicated dish here” migrate to the pantry to either evolve or die.

Cleaning the pantry is a solo task, especially when there are divergent philosophies on how to interpret date codes on food. One school of thought is that things go out the day the expiration date passes. Others of us take a more liberal approach, viewing those dates as merely guidelines, kind of like the traffic markings on the road in NYC or select Bible verses. They are somewhat informative if they agree with the position you wish to take, but otherwise you can chart your own path.

Even I have to admit, though, that there comes a time when you have to look at something, admit that you are NEVER going to use that in your entire life, and either give it away or throw it out. It was with that fresh philosophy that I tore into the pantry.

It was not an easy task, eating up substantial parts of both days of the weekend and exacting a significant emotional toll on me.

We might need that.

I am gonna make “insert name of impossibly complicated dish here” with that.

There are starving children in China who will go to bed hungry if we waste that.

I never said the arguments were logical. They are a part of my DNA, though, and it is exhausting to try and overcome them.

Kind of like making myself go to the gym.

Never mind that there are at least three grocery stores within a one-mile radius of our house. Even in the worst blizzard, I could trek through the ice and snow for a package of brown sugar and chocolate chips in the event of a baking emergency.

At the end of the day, the only old things in the pantry were those that I intentionally left there. Indeed, they are so old that they no longer qualify as “food”.

Three bottles of “Adam’s Extract” – glass memorials with cork liners in the metal lids, which were left in the house by Mrs. Miller when we moved in, and a tiny bottle of Olive Oil that I scarfed from Mom’s kitchen when I moved into my first apartment.

Not because I needed olive oil – I suspect that this was acquired by her shortly after she and Dad married in 1959, in those days when everything was deep-fried in Crisco and nobody knew what to do with something as impossibly exotic as olive oil, but it looked like something that a well-stocked kitchen would have.

I just liked the shape and size of the bottle, and it reminded me of growing up and mom’s kitchen.

I suspect the next chapter of the cleaning saga will go to the other extreme, attacking items with a much shorter life-span than some of the foodstuff in the pantry, as we have two separate closets with a variety of electronic gadgets in them, including a huge tangle of charging adapters of uncertain provenance that seem to have crossed species and interbred in the darkness of their environment.

Part of me will want to try to match them to whatever gizmo they originally powered, placing the technology all together in a nice ziplock bag for future generations, while the rational side of my mind says, “If you haven’t used it in that long, you don’t need it. Put it in the box to throw away.”

Maybe I should take a few weeks off before tackling that, though, giving my psyche a chance to adapt to the new rules.

Stitch's Birthday

Last Sunday was a special day in our family.

Our little boy is turning one, and it’s hard to believe that he’s only been with us for a few months.

That’s how completely he’s taken over. He thinks that everyone who comes to the house is here to see him. Same for everyone who happens to be anywhere else that I take him – the dry cleaners, the bank, Lowe’s Hardware – it’s really surprising how many places are dog-friendly when you start to look around.

Other than food-service places and the cable company, nobody seems to think much about it. Maybe it’s because he’s cute. Maybe it’s because he’s not so huge that he scares people, or that he’s fairly well behaved (we’re still working on how to greet someone without jumping).

So he’s now my constant companion. He’s in the office when I’m at work, occasionally comes to the courthouse with me (although we sneak in through the back door to visit the people in the clerk’s office) and is VERY disappointed when I leave him locked in the kitchen alone.

Most of the time, if it’s not too early, Martin has come down to get him so that he and his brother Yoko can go for a walk. Then they spend a lot of the day together, often going to the park to play if the weather is good.

I understand now why parents of human children engage nannies. If a puppy can take up t

his much energy, I don’t see how anyone can get anything done with a human baby. I don’t see how the parents of multiples get anything at all done.

So things have changed during the last year. We’ve got a plastic scraper

and a squirt bottle of vinegar water sitting around most of the time, just in case of “accidents”.

Although it seems as though they are more “on purpose” than “accidents” any more.

I wish that we’d bought stock in a paper towel company. We’d be rich.

Like a little kid, it often doesn’t occur to him (or big brother Yoko, although he’s getting better) to tell someone that he’s got to go potty until it’s too late. Thus, the phrase becomes, “I have to go potty – never mind,” all being uttered before I can make it out of the chair, much less to put on my shoes and get the leash and other accessories that are required for every trip outdoors.

The other habit that we’re trying to break relates to those accidents, and this is really disgusting, is how the boy tries to hide the “evidence”, which is really hard if you don’t have hands. Or paper towels. Or cleaning fluid.

It kinda limits your options to – well, your mouth.

Let’s remember who in the house can and cannot brush their teeth.

This is one of those things that calls for parental intervention, so after a bit of research we ended up with a bottle of pills that are designed to make one’s poop taste bad.

Let’s think about that one – I don’t even want to know what is in them that could possible make sh*t taste worse than it undoubtedly already does.

Things are getting better, though, and the activity seems to be on the wane. Until we’re absolutely sure, though, we’ll stick to hugs instead of kisses.

When the reality of becoming parents of a full-time four-legged child (in addition to our foster-care of Martin’s pug-child, Yoko), we were determined not to become “those” people – the ones who talk incessantly about their dog child, gushing on and on about what little Fifi did and, of course, whipping out photographs with the least provocation.

That lasted about a week.

Days are now planned around the puppy’s needs. He doesn’t understand the concept of “weekend” and “sleeping in” although he’s happy to climb up on my lap and spend the morning there. Martin keeps him when we go out in the evening or on the weekend, or away for a few days.

But I can’t imagine what life would be like without him any more.

And you don't have to ask me twice to get me to drag out the phone full of pictures.

One Sick Puppy

So it was the end of the week. I’m jumping ahead and will have to go back and fill in the details about the week, but for now recognize this all happened last Friday night.

Of a loooonnnggg week. We’d just gotten back from dinner and picked the puppy up from Martin.

I should have recognized something was up, because he (the puppy, not Martin) immediately came down the stairs home. Usually he’s the recalcitrant grandchild, screaming to stay with Grandma and Grandpa rather than come home with his parents.

Once downstairs, nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary. He was hanging around the food bowl – I called to confirm that he had, in fact, had supper.

Yep, he’d been fed. Nothing more here, besides a dried apricot (which are healthy for all of us and usually on the counter).

Up to bed to watch a little TV, and the furry child wouldn’t settle. He wanted down off the bed. Usually he just snuggles down and sleeps. This time, though, I had to retrieve him from downstairs by the heater vent.

That wasn’t unusual, as it’s one of his favorite places now that he’s learned where the warm comes out. It’s our first real cold snap of the season, and they’d all been on a long walk just before he came home.

That’s fine, though. He can come up on the bed to watch TV with us for a while and warm up there – electric blankets are the friend of anyone who lives in an old house with absolutely no insulation.

So finally, with some coercion on our part, he was lying there while we each read.

Then it happened. What every parent has experienced at some point – he sat up and gave us that look that says, “Dad, I think I’m gonna . . . . .”

No more words were needed. Cleaning towels, however, were. Quickly.

It’s amazing how two grown men can go from a prone position to upright, removing the dog from the bed and trying to grab a towel.

The problem with a 4 legged child who’s sick, of course, is that it’s not clear what you do with them.

With a human child, you shove them in the bathroom, hopefully somewhere in the direction of the toilet. With a dog-child, that accomplishes nothing other than at least keeping the mess confined to the tile floor.

Like so many kids, once the “bad stuff” was out, the rest of the night was relatively calm.

For him. We had extra laundry to deal with, however.

The New Year, Redux

We’re a week into the new year now, and I’m already behind. It’s all because of what I brought back from NYC this time around.

My souvenir from NYC circa 2012? – A wicked cold.

It’s “wicked” not that it’s so terrible as it is simply evil. I've had much worse colds before.

It’s wicked in that it’s not bad enough to send me to bed bereft of the ability to do anything useful, but leaves me instead among the walking wounded, free to hack and spew my way around society as I try to maintain some semblance of normalcy.

I couldn’t change my telephone message saying I was out of the office for most of the week because I didn’t have enough voice to make a comprehensible message.

When I answered the telephone, it so startled several people that they simply hung up, not knowing what else to do to the amphibious warbling coming from the other end under the guise of speach.

It’s also wicked in that it has derailed all of my good intentions about habits I was going to start for the new year.

Going to the gym.Writing regularly. Going to bed at a reasonable hour Sleeping through the night.

OK, the dog gets some of the blame for killing the last one. He seems to think that he needs a bit of reassurance along about 4:30 in the morning, along with the chance to go out. I can’t blame him, as it’s not unusual for me to need to make a bathroom visit about that same time.

Unfortunately, whether it is he or I that need to visit the toilet, it tends to be about the time that I’ve stopped hacking enough to finally fall off to sleep.

But you get the drift.

So for the past week, I’ve been exiled to the guest room, with a bed specifically designed to encourage visitors to go home after 4 days.

Well, not exactly. But it’s not the room I’m used to sleeping in and there’s no cable box, which means that my television sleeping choices have been pretty limited.

Stitch the Wunderdog wasn’t all that thrilled about it, either. After a week of living with Uncle Martin upstairs, he was surprised that he wasn’t sleeping in the same bed as either of his daddies and was returned to his own bed/box, downstairs in my office, some subordinate or household pet or something.

It was really traumatic for a couple of hours the first night. Fortunately that was before I found out that you can't take cough syrup and blood pressure meds at the same time, so I slept through most of it.

Fortunately for me, I also woke up each morning afterwards.

So, like someone in the Greek Orthodox Church, I’m celebrating the new year a few days late. I’m feeling better now, though, and my resolve is returning as the light-headedness from the various cold remedies diminishes.

So let’s start 2012 over again.