Lost In The 'Hood

No one could possibly become lost in Colonial Place. But I did.

Today was scarey. I set out at 4:20 A.M. with the lively Porque Choppe. Wanted to do a biiiiig walk but not in the worst heat of the day, hoped to be home again before flames shot out the top of the thermometer. Turned up Gosnold. Moving along briskly. Soon reached the point where it's hard to breathe. Persevered. Walked through my personal wall and kept going. Began to sweat. Thought, "Must turn around now so that I can make it all the way home." I turned and walked on. And on and on and on and on. Hey! What the...I came to a cross street which proved that I was going away from home, not toward it.

I looked up and down the street, confused. The sun peeped over the edge of the world somewhere, but there was no clear east or west in the sky visible from my position. I turned what I hoped was toward 38th Street and walked on, slowly now. Tired. My legs hurt. Sweating. On and on and on. Finally I turned again toward what I hoped was the direction of home.

Porque barked. A runner with her dog. I yelled, "Hey! Impossible to believe as this may be, I'm lost. Where's 38th Street?"

Skinny young woman laughed, "Don't feel bad. I've gotten turned around, too. It's the traffic circles. If you start across the street at a traffic circle and you're thinking about something else, you can easily go an extra quarter turn and wind up a right angle from where you thought you were going."

She got me organized. Farther from home than I've ever been without a car, already tired and sweaty. If I had a cell phone, that would have been the time to call a cab. No phone. I toiled on.

Evntually houses looked familiar. Very, very slowly we staggered up the porch steps, opened the door. Porque dashed to her water bowl. I took a Dew from the fridge. Whew!

Lesson learned. When going around traffic circles, pay attention.

Porque's Potification

The main reason for walking a dog is to get it all wrung out. That's why you allow the dog to urinate on every little blade of vegetation along the way after first sniffing for other dogs' similar messages. I never cease to be amazed at how many times a tiny chihuahua can urinate on one walk with the temperature nearly 90 degrees. By the time we get back home, she's got to be approaching negative hydration. This morning I counted the incidents in a five block stroll. That little dog urinated at least thirty times... when I stopped counting. She must have rationed it out so at each stop she only had to squeeze out one drop. She dashed into the kitchen and began to drink immediately, thus defeating the purpose for the walk.

Of course the other purpose for the walk is that the dog defecate on someone else's yard. It's horrible attitudes like this that get dog owners hated. Letting your dog make a big steamy pile right where some poor soul is going to put his foot as he steps out of his car coming home from work this afternoon, sick and wrong, folks, very bad. I never do anything so crude because although I fondly hope that Porque Choppe will defecate on someone else's lawn, as soon as she's finished, I pick it up in a plastic grocery bag, using the bag as a glove. Then I tie the bag shut. Before going indoors, we of course stop by the garbage tub next to the garage. Now Porque's turds are nothing like the proverbial steamy pile. She makes itty bitty little nuggets which become rock hard and turn black in about fifteen minutes if not picked up. On the few occasions when I left the house without my needed grocery sack, Porque's products were a great embarrassment and I tried to kick them under a bush. Someone over on the next street has a ghastly dog that defecates all over the sidewalk. Porque wouldn't do that. That other misbegotten mutt wouldn't either if I were walking him. What kind of block head allows a dog to poop on the sidewalk?

Why am I writing about dog excrement? Isn't there already enough trouble in the world without some dodo talking about doggy doodoo? Yes there is. However, I need to talk this out because this morning at the park up the street, I stepped in a vast squash of highly odoriferous dog accident. A ninety year old man across from the park owns a bossy, opinionated poodle which excretes like it was a water buffalo instead of a ten pound dog. Yes, all that drech came out of the poodle, supposedly a classy breed. I hate that zero-class hyperactive ass poodle. I wasn't even wearing sneakers, just sandals with no sides. Think about it. GRRRRRR........ If Porque cranked out more raw material, I'd collect it and leave it on his porch right in front of the door. I don't care if that poor old man is ninety years old. He shouldn't let his dog leave land mines of this description.

More War

As long as I'm remembering goofy things that happened in school, I might as well tell a few more war stories.

One of the craziest things that ever happened to me was the day I was helping out in the office for a short while. I happened to be on hand when a secretary had to run somewhere with a message and asked me to cover for her. So I stood by the counter thinking my own thoughts and a large woman came in the door. The thing that struck me first was the way she walked. Extraordinarily stiff. No bilateral motion, if you know what I mean. Her arms rigidly attached to her sides, her head straight forward, her eyes straight forward. She walked up to the counter.

Me: May I help you?
Her: Yes, I'm here to shoot Mr. Reed. Would you know where he is?
Me: Well, sure I know. I'll go get him for you. How about you have a seat and I'll be right back.
Her: Thank you.

I walked calmly around the corner and then ran as fast as I could go to the office of the school policeman. I told him the situation. He immediately phoned the station for back-up. He went to the front of the school to wait for the extra officers and asked me to go back to the office and stall the woman. I gulped but agreed to go back to the office. On the way to the office, I stopped in the teachers' lounge and got a cup of coffee and a handful of cookies.

Back in the office...
Me: I'm so sorry. Mr. Reed is going to be a few minutes. Could I ask you to step in here where there's a table and have a cup of coffee with me while you wait?

I took her into a side office where there was a table and I got her to sit down with her back to the door. Then I excused myself and went out to see if the other police had arrived yet. They had. They asked me to please go back to the office and sit talking to the woman so they could grab her from behind, hopefully avoiding a shoot-out. I got another cup of coffee and went back to the office.

Me: Mr. Reed will be right here. He's on his way. So, what made you decide to get up this morning and come to shoot Mr. Reed?

All this in a chatty voice.

Her: Well I couldn't do it before because I was out of town.
Me: Oh, yes? On vacation?
Her: No. I was in the hospital.
Me: Oh, I'm sorry. Feeling better now?
Her: Yes I do feel better when I take my meds. Yesterday I ran out, though, and I don't feel very good today. My head feels funny.

A policeman's head peeked out around the door frame and the man gave me a wink. Suddenly all the police rushed into the room and threw themselves on the woman, wrestled her to the ground, handcuffed her. One of them looked into her purse and sure enough, there was a hand gun. She hadn't given them much of a fight and still seemed pretty calm so I asked, "But why did you want to kill Mr. Reed?"

Her: I was in his class when I was a kid and one time he flunked me. I swore some day I'd get even for that because it wasn't fair. Today was gonna be the day, but now I guess I'll just have to do it some other time.

War Story Number Two...

One afternoon as I was about to leave the building, two little girls ran in the front door and one of them grabbed my arm.

Child: You have to come out with us. Please. There's a crazy woman out there and she just mooned us. I have to wait out there for my mom and I don't want to go where that lady is without a grown-up.

So I went out with the girls to see the crazy lady. Sure enough there stood a very peculiar woman. Seeing the girls, she began to shake her fist and and yell at them, some incoherent nonsense. I asked her to come into the school with me. To my astonishment, she turned her back, bent over and pulled up the one garment she was wearing. No underpants. She stood back up to see the effect this had on me. Probably I looked shell shocked, my mouth hanging open. Now that I thought about it, I realized that the garment she wore was some kind of tight see-through tank top and she had no bra. Since she was a fairly big woman, this was quite a spectacle.

Then a little boy came out of the school and she yelled at him to get into the car. He told her he had to hunt for something in the lost and found, so she accompanied him into the office. I followed her.

Something about that little boy made me angry. I knew him to be a very intelligent, shy and sensitive child. His mother, to say the least, was embarrassing him nearly to death. When the mother and son got into the office, I closed the door behind them so that no one else would come in. This surprised the principal and a couple of secretaries who looked up and then goggled at the woman in horror. The little boy asked for his item from the lost and found and the principal led him around the corner to find whatever it was for himself. With the child out of the way, I took a deep breath and told that woman exactly what I was thinking. Then I asked her to go wait in the rest room. I went to the lost and found where the boy still hunted for his lost item. I grabbed the first big pair of sweat pants and first big sweat shirt I could find and took them to the woman in the restroom. A few minutes later, if her son was surprised to see his mother wearing kid's clothes, he didn't say so.

The oddest part of that story was that the next semester, the little boy was put into my room at his mother's request. When conference time rolled around, I wondered how awkward it was going to be to face this woman. Not awkward at all. She couldn't have been nicer. To judge by her behavior, she didn't remember the bad day at all.

Third war story...

One afternoon at dismissal time I followed a group of kids downstairs toward the main exits. Directly in front of me was an unusually big boy whom I did not recognize. I was just deciding that he had to be a new kid when he lifted a pile of books high over his head and brought them down hard on the head of the boy in front of him. I helped the injured boy to a seat in the office, asked the secretary to call the kid's mother to come and pick him up. Then I turned to the offender whom I had told to accompany us, asked for his home phone number, directed him to sit down, and called his house. His mother answered. I told her what I had seen. Naturally, she seemed to be upset. Then it turned out that she was angry with me and not angry with her son. She said, "You stay right there. My husband is coming over there, lady!"

In just a few minutes both parents came into the office. Father was falling down drunk. Mother had her hair in curlers but otherwise seemed to be firing on all eight cylinders. Both parents were loud and belligerent. I asked them into a side office where we could talk without drawing a crowd.

From my point of view, I didn't understand why they were so angry with me. They didn't seem to be the least bit upset with their son but they were so mad at me, I worried one of them was going to beat me up. Come to find out it was all about the word BIG. On the phone with the mother I had said, "You know, your son is a very big boy and so when he hit someone's head with all those books, he's lucky not to have killed the kid." All she heard was BIG.

They'd just moved up north from a rural area in the deep south and even there where educational standards were low, the son had failed at least four times. So he should have been a junior in high school. They were extremely embarrassed about this. Not because he'd failed, not because he was dumb as a box of rocks, but because he looked so big compared to others in his grade. Both parents were shouting at me, "Don't you CALL him BIG. You don't ever say BIG to MY boy. Lady, you better right now apologize to my boy if you said BIG about him....on and on, blahblahblah big big big."

The principal hearing their shouts, came in and asked what was going on. They hollered and carried on about how I said BIG about their boy. By now, the father was kind of fading into the carpet, lying so low in his chair that he was nearly horizontal, but he could still make some noise, passing-out drunk or not. Eyes closed, he chimed in with his wife. Everything she said, he repeated the last few words. If anything he said included the word BIG, he'd open his eyes and glare at me venomously while saying it.

The principal suspended the boy and walked the parents out of the building, then went back toward the office scratching his head, muttering, "BIG! BIG! BIG!" to himself.

One more war story...

I had a very lively, intelligent, but annoying and deliberately disobedient little boy in my class. He wanted to talk all the time and if told to be quiet, he became rude and surly. Finally, in desperation, I began to write his name on the board each time I was forced to hush him up. That got his attention for a little while, then that, too, wasn't enough, so I made a rule that for each time his name went on the board, he'd need to stay after school for five minutes. Angrily, he intentionally ran up 35 minutes of detention in less than the next ten minutes of class time.

That night at dismissal time, I reminded him that he'd sentenced himself to some detention. He boo-hooed and cried and blubbered and carried on but finally admitted that he had brought this thing upon himself. Then he said that he would have to go outside and tell his mother. I said that he could tell her and go on home, but he'd need to serve the detention the next day...giving him time so his mother would have notice of when to pick him up. He got his things and left, only to return immediately, his mother alongside. He looked smug and smirky. She looked like a woman who was about to give me an earful.

She asked why her son was going to have detention and I explained. As I talked, she got madder and madder at me. When I finished talking, she stood up...we'd been seated at my request. She stormed across the space between us and stood over me so closely that my face was less than an inch from her dress. Then she went into the best rant I've ever heard. Since I was seated in kind of an angled space, she had me trapped. Couldn't get away from her. For over an hour and a half, she roared an almost seamless stream of abuse at me. Once in a while she made sort of fake slashes at my face with her long curved finernails, like a tiger. Finally a fellow teacher walked into the room to ask about an upcoming school event. Shocked at what she saw, she got on the phone and called down to the office for help. The principal literally ran upstairs and took over for me. I grabbed my purse and left the building.

Next morning the principal called me down to the office and sent someone up to cover my class for a while. The woman and her husband and son were with the principal in his office. The husband was very big and very quiet. He said to me, "My wife would like to apologize to you, but she's embarrassed. She made a fool of herself yesterday and set a terrible example for our son. I'm pastor of the local Baptist Church and as such both I and my family have a responsibility to model the best possible behavior for our congregation as well as for the community. My wife has done this kind of thing before but I didn't insist that she apologize so she felt safe to repeat the mistake. To make a terrible, irrational display of bad temper like she did is not only rude, it's probably legally actionable as assault. It just cannot happen again. That's why we are going to sit here until she makes a satisfactory apology, embarrassed or not. Then after that happens, she and I are going home and this afternoon my son will serve his perfectly reasonable detention. If that doesn't succeed in making him more mannerly, please call me because I do believe in applying the board of education to the seat of understanding. I've never actually done it, but it's a possibility. Well, honey?"

It was quiet for a while. Then she started apologizing and did it quite abjectly. She told about how she had longed for children, was told she couldn't have any, gave up and then was so thrilled to find herself pregnant. How she loved her son so much but she knew she was ruining him. She couldn't tolerate any criticism of his bratty behavior. Knew she was wrong, but couldn't get herself under control. Hoped that the humiliation she had brought on herself would be a deterrent to any future outbursts. She cried and cried. The boy made as if to get up and go to his mother, but his father gave him a look.

When she finished, I accepted her apology and went back to class with the boy. He did his detention and made fewer mistakes as time went on. Watching his mother clean up her act had been therapeutic.

kids teachers education teaching students

Bad Children

Here's the question of the day; looking back over your life, who is the worst child you ever saw? What was the kid doing? Where was this? And when? Wait, we're getting into lots of questions instead of just one. But think about it. You've surely seen naughty children. Which was the worst? I am spoiled by choice.

Maybe it was the big boy riding in his mom's shopping cart. He asked his mother for a balloon, the kind you see in bunches above the check-outs at food stores. Mom said, "No." The boy went berserk. He stood up in the cart and kicked wildly in all directions, trying to connect with his mother who jumped nimbly around avoiding him. He raged and swore at her. She seemed to take it pretty much for business as usual. Not exactly as embarrassed or flustered as you might expect. I was stuck in the checkout line behind her, couldn't get away, had to witness the whole episode. She eventually turned to me, caught my eye, smiled lamely, "We're a little cranky today."

Then there was an awful sixth-grader I had one semester in school. Between classes we teachers were supposed to patrol our section of the school halls, allowing students to go into class with no teacher in the room. For safety's sake, if I had a student whom I considered a danger to himself or others, I'd make him stand by the door until I went into the room with him. Well, this little bad boy was annoying but had previously shown no inclination toward bodily damage, so it didn't occur to me to keep him in the hallway with me. And then one day I walked into class to see all the children in their chairs except for crazyboy who had climbed up onto the heating unit in front of the window, opened the window, and was on his way out into the second story air. I dived across the room, grabbed him by the ankles and pulled him back inside, off the heating unit, and marched him into his seat. All that time, he twisted and struggled, screaming at me to get my hands off him as though I were abusing him. Then I called for the principal who removed the dear lad from my room and sent him home. Next day the boy's mother showed up saying that she'd decided to sue me because I had injured her little darling. There were bruises on his ankles. The principal came upstairs, asked me to step into the hall, then he went into my room and closed the door. Later he told me that he asked the students to tell him what had happened the previous day. They all said I'd saved the kid's life but I should have let him fall.

Many years ago I had a little boy in kindergarten who had never been disciplined in any way, a truly feral child. The structure of a school day came as a nasty surprise to him. He fought it all and pretty much wore me out. One day he took his tantrums to a new level by getting down on the floor like an alligator and following me around trying to bite my ankles. He connected a few times and although I ordinarily struggled through the morning with him, about then I gave up and called for the principal. She walked in and saw me jumping around to save myself from being bitten, laughed and said something to indicate that she considered the whole problem a result of my lack of experience. Then in a kindly voice, she said, "Now, Myron. I want you to stop biting Miss Jenkins and come with me." He ignored her and kept after my ankles as though he were starving and I were steak. The principal abandoned the kind voice and spoke sharply, "Myron! You stop that right now and come here!" He ignored her. Well, it escalated until finally the principal tried to pick the little boy up. He stopped biting me and turned on her, bit her all over the hands and arms, snapping like a mad dog. She set him down and then picked him up by the ankles. Head down, he snapped at her legs and at one point got her a good one. Holding her arms straight out to keep him as far from her as possible, she staggered out the door with the child twisting and turning still trying to bite her.

Then there was the eighth grade boy who'd fried his brain on drugs, usually pretty quiet because he was stoned. One day, though, he came to class twitchy, jumpy, couldn't sit still for a minute, couldn't shut his mouth for a minute, babbling senselessly, facial tics going to beat the band, bouncing around, hitching and jerking in his chair. I walked toward him intending to quietly ask him to step back out into the hallway. He jumped up and yelled at me, "Don't you come near me. If you do, I'll have to kill you." At that point, I was standing between him and the classroom door. Students were still coming in to class. I turned away from him toward the door thinking of asking a student to go get the large man who taught in the next room. Suddenly a big boy grabbed me from behind and yanked me to one side. Another child slammed into the back of the drugged boy knocking him out into the hallway, a third boy slammed the door shut. Fortunately at that time all teachers had to keep their classroom doors locked because of a problem the previous week with a drunk that wandered into the building and made trouble. The boy in the hall threw himself violently against the door, roaring, "I'm going to kill you!" and beating on the door with his fists. The glass in the door was steel mesh reinforced or it would have shattered. I used the room phone and called downstairs. The principal, a gym teacher, and the school policeman ran upstairs and removed the boy. Probably the boy wouldn't have been able actually to kill me, but he certainly intended to try and I owed grateful thanks to the three who knocked the kid out of the room and got me out of his way.

Of course, a list of bad kids would have to include a boy who was quite a bit bigger than any of the others owing to the fact that he'd failed every grade and should have been almost ready to graduate. He was a bully and any teachers on playground duty had to watch him full time because he loved to hurt the smaller children. One day I saw a circle form on the other side of the playground, and the whole playground got quiet in a hurry. Children ran from every direction to see what was going on inside that circle. Of course, I, too, ran to see. Pushing through the mob, I came up behind a very little boy standing frozen with fear. Across from him stood the bully, a knife in his hand. He threw the knife a short distance from himself and it stuck in the dirt. The bully said, "Next time I'm throwing it farther," and he did. Everyone remained frozen in place. Said the bully, "Nobody better move because I might make a mistake and hit you," and he smirked. I pushed the little boy behind me and walked up to the bully, my hand out. To my surprise, he gave me the knife.

That kid was like a boy who threatened me with a gun. He entered school mid-year because he'd been expelled from the school district next to us. A greasy kid who chronically needed a hair cut. Did no school work at all, sat sneering in his chair, a bundle of hostility. According to neighborhood gossip, his dad was a local Mafia enforcer, a leg breaker, etc. Clearly, Louis was headed for dad's line of work and saw no need for an education. Some muley impulse wouldn't allow me to just fail him. I had to get him to do his school work. So he hated me even more than he hated the teachers who let him sit doing nothing but sneer. Many times he told me that he was going to kill me. Then one day the class was quiet, everyone working on an assignment, and I sat down at my desk to begin grading papers. After a few minutes I looked up and there was Louis, staring at me, sneering, not doing his work. I said, "Louis, get going," and he reached down into his book bag, I thought, to get a pencil, but what came up and pointed at me was a gun. I got up and walked toward him, hand out. Surprisingly, he gave me the gun. It turned out to be part of his father's business equipment, had been used in the commission of several unsolved crimes. That was the last we saw of Louis.

Hm... who else? Oh, yes. Can't forget the boy so terrible that he was almost never in class. He sat in the hall all the time doing nothing. Not a teacher in the building could stand this kid because he was so violent, foul mouthed and oppositional. My heart sank when I saw his name on one of my class lists because I knew all about him. He was infamous. Sure enough, he set himself to add me to his long list of defeated teachers. I didn't believe in putting children in the hallway and I certainly couldn't just dump the boy on the office staff, so I wracked my brains for ways to keep him out of trouble. Sometimes I almost succeeded but it was a discouraging task and senseless, really. Looking back, I should have set him in the hallway like everyone else did. However, I persevered against all advise and daily the boy got madder at me. Finally, one day he jumped up, grabbed an empty desk, picked it up and whirling it in the air over his head, advanced on me yelling that he was going to kill me. Without being asked, a student ran for help. As I dodged around the room away from him, John continued to whirl the desk and come after me. A posse of four men teachers and the school policeman rushed into the room and almost didn't manage to drag the boy out with them. He fought like a maniac. Before being taken out of the building in hand cuffs, he was able to smash a section of reinforced glass in the front of the school. For an average child of that age, it would just about be possible for him to pick up a desk, but not to lift it over his head let alone whirl it around. Gotta be crazy strong to do that. Imagine my horror one day many years later when I went into a gas station down the street and saw this kid, then grown up, behind the counter. Recognizing me, he grinned evilly and said, "Ah. Miss Jenkins. You know it wouldn't be much work for me to figure out where you live. You'd love me to come over to your house, wouldn't you?"

What about bad girls? I've seen lots of them. Maybe the worst was a girl from a criminal family; everyone did time; they were all terrible people. I didn't have this girl in class but I knew about her. One day I heard a yell, "Hey! A fight!" and the sound of running feet. Classes were changing and the hall was full of bodies, most of them running in one direction. I struggled through the crowd. At the center of the herd was a boy down on the floor. This bad girl sat on top of him, her thumbs pressed into his throat. His eyes were bugging out and his face was blue. The crowd encouraged her, "Kill! Kill!" they chanted. I grabbed her by one arm and pulled until she let go of the boy. With her other arm, she made a fist and punched me in the face as hard as she could hit, screaming, "Get your hands off me!"

Another awful girl asked to be excused to use the bathroom. She was carrying an enormous purse that I hadn't seen before. Obviously she had a lot of stuff in that purse and it was kind of heavy. I just thought that she sure was carrying a great deal of unnecessary weight. It never occurred to me that she might be up to no good with the contents of the purse. So she went into the bathroom and unloaded the purse which held about half a bushel of newspapers. She separated the papers into single sheets, crumpled these, piled them all in a corner of the restroom and set the paper on fire, and came back to class. After a short while the fire alarm went off and soon the hall filled with smoke and water as firemen doused the entire area. Outside standing in the sunshine, waiting for the OK to go back indoors, I put two and two together.

Then there was the girl from a family of relocated southern rednecked racists, the kind of people who outspokenly hate African Americans. Apparently she was working to maintain the osmic balance by going way too far the other way. Madeleine was on a mission to get pregnant and have a black baby. She had to handle all necessary proliminaries toward this goal while she was in school since her family never would have let her date a non-caucasion boy. During Madeleine's Junior High years, the whole staff had to be vigilant, everyone from cooks to custodians to teachers. At any time when she was not sitting at a desk in a class, that girl was sure to hook up with a black boy and was doing her level best to get herself pregnant. She was pried off boy after boy after boy and in the craziest places. No shame whatsoever.

I remember a girl who certainly had a power personality. She was smart and could have been an A student but instead used all her intelligence to get herself and others into trouble. It was something different every day; she just kept me hopping. No way to anticipate what new devilishness she'd invent. The worst thing was her ability to lead weak minds, to get dumb little kids to do her bidding. I could have written a book about the semester she spent with me; she came up with so many crazy and disruptive schemes. One of her talents was the blue-eyed, baby-faced honest-to God believable lie and she managed to convince the school principal that she was a poor little picked on child, unfairly singled out for punishment by the twisted minds of the entire school staff. So she managed to avoid all consequences of her reign of terror until the day that she went too far. She skipped school and talked two dumb girls into going with her. They went to the part of town where hookers cruise the sidewalk looking for business. There, they successfully attracted several customers each, using the men's cars as their work site. With the money they made, they went to a liquor store with their last customer, a man who agreed to go into the store and buy liquor for them. They took the tequila to a park, sat on a bench and got drunk, shared the alcohol with several homeless men in the park. Finally, all of them drunk out of their minds, they went back to this girl's house long enough for her to go to the kitchen and find a knife for each of them. Then the whole group walked to school and somehow were able to just walk in. They got busted when one of the girls went to the door of a classroom, knocked, and asked the teacher if they might please speak to a girl in the class; drunkenly honest, they said that they'd come to, "Cut her bad." The teacher, astonished to see this party of drunks, adult men and junior high school girls, closed her door in their faces and called for help. Getting all those drunks into police cars was a circus to behold. Teachers had a lot of fun telling the principal, "I told you so!"

Well, I could go on forever telling war stories about bad kids. Hard to pick a winner in that category, too many strong candidates. 99.999% of school children are good little people who behave and do their best. That .001% of baddies, though, is a dynamic group, unforgettable.


naughty disobedient rotten stinky kids

Rats! or something

I absolutely must get out of denial and deal with the rats in my house. Must. Have to. No way around it because those rats are not getting bored and leaving. When I say rats, I mean at least rats. The other day one ran around above the kitchen ceiling and by the thudding and so forth it could easily have been a dog. Like maybe a cocker spaniel-sized one. Horrible wretched troublemaking thing.

Rats moved into my jam cupboard last fall and ate their way through everything edible in there, turned the entire closet into a rat toilet that you can smell from the front door of my house. Every morning there's an array of rat turds on the floor in front of the closet.

So what did I do about this awful problem? I bought rat poison. Did I set it out where the rats could enjoy it? No. Why not? I don't know. Theories. One: I'm chronically sick and could die at any moment and I don't like to nudge any other life form into my own predicament. Being sick and dying. It's not good. Two: I'm afraid to open any door behind which might be a rat. What if a rat jumped out and bit me?

Besides buying rat poison, I bought an Oust air freshener thing that is powered by a battery. I set it on top of the jam cupboard. Also I bought lots of paper towels and window cleaner to use in cleaning up rat turds. Wouldn't want stuff like that to sit around here potentially threatening me with bubonic plague. I'm already dying of several other things. No need to get completely ridiculous about the level of disease to which I expose myself.

Besides rats being smelly and scary and disease-ridden, what's the harm? Well, these wretched rodents inflict subtle damage which accumulates so I'm crazier all the time. It's very bad for a person to not be able to deal with life in a sensible timely fashion. From not being able to open the boxes of rat poison, I've gone downhill to not being able to open letters, can't leave the house and go for walks because I can't open the door. Since I can't go for walks, I'm getting insanely fat. Because there's a close link between obesity and Alzheimers, I'm getting stupider by the day. Since I can't open letters, I might be in trouble and not even realize it until police show up and batter down the door.

Am I making up all this? No. It's only too true that my house reels under a massive infestation of rats, staggers in place from the impact. My dog won't eat in the kitchen anymore because rats ran out of something to eat in the jam closet and now they're trying to chew their way into the dog food container which is beside Porque Choppe's dish. Every time I go to the kitchen, rats jump out of sight, from where they were chewing the dog food container into a closet of cooking implements, "Crash, thud, whammy," as they rush in among ladles, whisks, shredders, spatulas, etc. Everything I use must first be washed with hot, soapy water to get rid of rat urine and doodoo.

A couple of mornings ago I came downstairs to make myself a cup of tea and there on the toaster sat a big, fat rat. The rat looked me in the eye, calculating, trying to decide if I represented a big enough threat that the rat should go someplace else. Then it sighed, shook it's head, and slowly climbed down into it's hidey hole. It was thinking that any day now I will be so demoralized that the rats can come out of hiding, stop pretending to be afraid of me. As I said, I've just got to deal with this.

Actually, what it is, I need help. Anybody. If you aren't afraid to do so, I need you to come over and open those boxes of poison, pour poison into dishes, set the dishes where rats can get the poison. Then I need you to return in a few days to remove dead rats. I'm sure there's something I could do for you in return, something I'm not afraid to do but it has you buffaloed, like I could call up your mother-in-law and tell her she's a pain in the neck. I'm sure we could work out a mutually advantageous arrangement. I'm looking for volunteers.

rats oh+the+rats

Memorial Day

I regret the necessity of armed services. Terrible waste of our money and the lives and well-being of millions of young people. Yes, we have to maintain a deterrent to aggression, but I don't have to like it. On Memorial Day we appreciate our military machine. Thing is, I think that if we must have all this stuff the sole purpose for which is to kill those who did or might harm us, I think we should go all the way with it. Reagan's Star Wars Defense thing...great idea then and more so now. We should make it literally impossible for anyone to attack us. Then we could send home all but a few deeply nerdy-techie soldiers/sailors/air force/marines. All of those present-day military and sincere young folks deserve jobs with an assured future. If I had a son of military age, I'd rather shoot him in the knee cap than have him go overseas in order to shoot a few terrorists. At least with a bum knee, he'd probably live out his life span. He wouldn't be one of the nearly 5,000 who have died so far in this war with radical Muslims. If only we could make the military unnecessary kind of like abortion should be ; ugly but increasingly rare. I get angry when I hear a young person brightly tell family/friends that he's going into the army because that will finance his education. 1) He will not get an education. 2) The army is just there to kill people, and along the way to that goal, many in the army are killed. It's all about killing and dying. There is no military education mandate.

Honestly, if I were the president, and if I thought it necessary to attack another country in order to prevent the destruction of America, I'd nuke the assholes and save the lives of our young folks in the military. If people in another country are so horrible that they have to be killed, then the best thing would be to kill as many as possible as fast as possible and not have any Americans die. I don't understand the concept of a fair fight. There's no point in fighting carefully and kindly and compassionately. That's absurd. If I ever have to either physically attack anyone or get killed, the person I attack is not going to know what hit them. In the Bible there's the story of Jael who seduced the general of the opposing army. Then as he slept, she hammered a nail into his head. Exactly. No fair fight there. He had no warning and she did get the job done with no loss of life on her side.

Basically I abhor the idea of war. It seems vile, wretched and pointless, a long, dragged out back and forth exchange of killings/maimings. Every year when Memorial Day rolls around, we should thank our military...until the day when we can turn them all into civilians. And God speed the day!


memorial+day war iraq military

Ethnic Festival

Today is the 23rd Edition of Afram, held every Memorial Day weekend in Norfolk down on the river between Norfolk and Portsmouth. Busy day. Across the river in Portsmouth was a re-enactment of some war episode. Once in a while you could hear cannon and rifles going off.

Norfolk Festivities began with a parade. Band after band after band. When I was a kid in the school's marching band, we played John Phillip Sousa and we just marched straight down the street. Nowadays band music is super jazzy and marchers shake their booty like hoochie girls going around a pole at a strip club. However, somehow it all still has an air of innocence and earnestness. This was a band competition so each band stopped in front of the judging stand. Benny and I pushed through the crowd for ring side seats on the curb. The music was deafening, but fun nevertheless. I think Benny had two favorite parts of the parade; one was the Old Dominion University lion mascot. Benny rushed out into the street to hug the lion. Uh, and his second favorite was a group of young men doing break dances at great risk to their hands on the hot pavement. Benny was impressed.

After the parade we bought tickets and went into the festival venue which is the riverside park. We walked all around and looked at the merchandise. I bought a fabulous outfit. Thank God I didn't have my Visa card. I'd have spent a fortune. The clothes were gorgeous. For lunch we had sweet tea and crab cakes at a tent booth. Oh, yes, and sweet potato fries liberally spiced with hot pepper.

About then the afternoon's music fired up at the bandstand. It began with the Star Spangled Banner, a jazzy rendition courtesy of a Baptist Church's in-house jazz band. Excellent. I right away got jealous. Why doesn't Christ and St. Luke's Episcopal Church have it's own jazz band, too? Whole lot of Vivaldi where I go to church and not enough jazz band! Something wrong with that picture.

Today's big day for African Americans in Norfolk, Virginia, was the kind of thing that everyone could and did enjoy. The smell of wonderful food; catfish, corn on the cob, shrimp, greens, mac and cheese, chicken, crab cakes, sweet tea. Happy music. Easy manners. We had a great time. I regret one thing. As we left, I noticed a vendor of very tall wooden giraffes. Baby Sadie loved them. Darn. If I'd had my Visa card, we could have brought those giraffes home with us.

The Yard

My front yard is a thing of beauty. The grass is cut and the edger runs on a regular basis. Fabulous flowers just about dazzle the eye.
The side yard is great, too. All along the house I grow flowers and vegetables. The lettuce is ready to eat. Herbs are doing well, beans are way up, three kinds of tomato plants are just going to town, loaded wih blossoms and tiny tomatoes.
Then the back yard. It's a jungle with horrible vines and rampant weeds.

Why, why, why? What's up with that back yard? Well, it's all about my yard person. Given his personal productivity, he's overbooked, took on too many jobs, can't get to all those houses. At least he cuts the parts of my yard visible from the street. He does this for me although not for the neighbors because I rush out and pay him the second he gets the front finished, and I overpay him. After I pay, he goes ahead and completes the side yard for me and then he puts away all his tools and goes to 7-11, comes back with a forty of Colt 45. Sits on the neighbor's front steps, drinks his drink, and goes home. Period. He's done. No more yards that day, no back yard job for me.

Isn't it stupid of me to pay him before he finishes the job? No. If I didn't do that, he wouldn't even be motivated to start. This individual is not your super-motivated person anyway. He and a chrony of his sit on a neighbor's steps by the hour doing nothing more active than to watch people walk past on the sidewalk and call out, "Hey!" Since I'm such a generous and prompt payer, he knows that he can count on getting beer money by starting to cut the grass at my house. No one else pays as much and no one pays so swiftly so no one else has a front and side yard looking as nice as mine do. Do I get disgusted with him? You betcha. Am I going to fire him? Not at all. It's only grass, not heart surgery. If he fools around drinking instead of cutting, nobody's going to die over it. He's a local character, very popular, well-thought of even by those who shake their heads about his unreliabitity regarding yard work. Eventually he does get all the grass cut on this block, just not very frequently...except for my house. My front and side yards get cut as often as he needs beer money, which is pretty often, thank goodness.

Pride And Joy

The feeling you get after working yourself into a rocking chair on the porch with a glass of sweet tea at hand, when after all kinds of effort, you finally and at last notice your work starting to pay off, bear fruit, look like it might happen. That's what I'm talking about. Since I hardly ever do more than is required to get sweet tea up to my mouth, I hardly ever feel any pride and joy, but there are moments.

We're doing our required walk-about, Porque Choppe and I. She requires it, so I do it. I swear, sometimes I wonder what I was thinking. How could I have deluded myself into believing that I could own a dog but not take it for walks? I must have been out of my mind. Whatever...here's this refried chihuahua that loves to go for a walk, so we walk. Little tiny Porque charges forward dragging all of me along. Her tail goes a mile a minute. Her nose deeply inhales the whole environment, vast sniffs. I grunt and groan and waddle along in her van, wondering if today I could get away with just a little whirl around the block. We come to the first corner. I stop at the edge of the curb. And wonder of wonders...Porque Choppe sits. She sits, I tell you. Without me yelling, "Sit," sixteen times and finally pushing her little butt down. That's a moment of pride and joy. It hardly ever happens, which makes my enjoyment of the rare and beautiful occasions of its occurrence all the more glorious.

I battle with ants in the house for most of the year. Other people just have ants in hot weather. I have a permanent colony, well ...I have many permanent colonies. Ants have built superhighways with elaborate rest stops every few feet on the walls and floors of this ricketty old house. Nothing dents their commitment. I have been known to get on my hands and knees and wash out the undersink area with clorox, then to saturate the still moist area with Raid ant spray, then to set out ant traps, all of it a complete waste of time and effort because the ants don't even stop while I work. They are willing to take any number of deaths. Not a problem if I wipe away literally thousands of them. The ants keep on keeping on into the dawn. So imagine the visceral thrill of joy the other day when I noticed that the main event superhighway to the great ant underworld somewhere, when I noticed not one ant there, not one. I stood in front of the stove and stared at the wall behind, the wall going up to the potato chip and cracker closet. Not one ding dang ant. Now that's some pride and joy going on.

Birds join all of nature in doing me wrong as follows; every year when I buy gorgeous flowering planters to hang on my porch, birds pick a planter for their nest. Inevitably I have to stop watering their choice of residence in deference to baby birds' inability to swim. Then the plant dies, but I can't even take it down and throw it away for fear of disturbing the nest. So every summer my porch sports one hideous hanging pile of dead vegetation, making me look like one of those people who don't pay attention. This year as always I forgot about that bird thing the minute I spotted beautiful hanging baskets at the local hardware. I bought a new kind of flower, delicate pink petals covering the whole plant and raining down the sides. I hung up the plants. I watered them. In fact I put money into a complicated plumbing venture designed to make it easy to water my hanging baskets. I ran a long series of hoses from the water outlet behind the house and a bought a pole thingy with a trigger on the bottom so I don't have to get the ladder out when I want to water the plants. The first time I used this, I was shocked when a bird flew out of one plant. Uh-oh. Not that again. Yes, that. I ran for the broom and sat in a porch rocker under the plant. Every time a bird tried to get back to that plant, I yelled, I waved the broom around. Finally, I concluded that birds and ants have a lot in common. And I gave up. So there it is. One dead brown horrible plant hanging up there with the rest. Then yesterday I went out onto the porch to get the mail and accidentally succumbed to the beauty of the weather. I sat down in my favorite rocker, put my feet up on a stool, sorted through ads for pizza, car wash joints, carpet cleaning, security systems, yadda, yadda. Suddenly there was a burst of music. A little bird just that minute arrived home with groceries, mouth full of bugs. Tiny heads bounced up and down below grocery bird. Oh, the rapturous singing. Shucks. That was nice. A moment of pride and joy that I'm too kind to kill little birds in order to protect my investment in plants. The little birds all sang their thanks and I, looking at the awful brown planter basket, I was proud and joyful.

chihuahuas ants sweet+tea flowers birds

Stamina And Determination

Friends are prone to think of me as a quitter, one who begins projects but does not carry them to completion. Those friends are not entirely right and here's my evidence...the doggy litter box. Yes, I meant doggy, not catty.

I live under the stern rule of a chihuahua, Porque Choppe. She does exactly what she pleases about every thing that occurs to her tiny little mind. She makes no accommodation. In our relationship, it is I who move over. I sleep on the thin edge so the chihuahua can have the whole middle of the bed, this in spite of the fact that the chihuahua actually only needs about one square foot of space. I drag my unwilling, anti-athletic self around the neighborhood because the chihuahua likes to sniff other people's lawns. I learned how to type with a chihuahua in my lap because the chihuahua feels entitled to sit on me. I who am too lazy to even carry my groceries into the house must carry a chihuahua every place I go, simply because she doesn't allow me out of the house without her. You see how this works, right?

However, there is one area of our lives where I simply refuse to budge, where it's my way or the highway. It's about potty time. I am absolutely committed to the notion of a doggy litterbox. This in spite of the fact that Porque Choppe will only go into her litterbox when she has no choice. I must pick her up and set her there or she won't go. Porque and I have gone about five hundred rounds over this issue and I have made zero progress. Not any. Porque isn't having it. I don't care. This is the hill where I plant my flag. Right there in that litter box, darn it. I may have spent $3,000 for the softest latex mattress in the world to be allowed only the thin edge of it. I may have carpel tunnel syndrome up to my shoulders from typing over a chihuahua. I may toil for miles around my neighborhood, dragged by a madly sniffing chihuahua. I may not be allowed to go to the mall without carrying the chihuahua. Yes, yes. I admit it. I'm a slave to a dog smaller than a football. But...I will not throw away the litter box and I will keep on trying to get Porque to go in there by herself. Yes, this house is filled with projects I haven't and won't finish, but before I expire, I expect to litter box train that little dog. It's going to happen. On this one issue, I have unlimited reserves of stamina and determination.

chihuahuas pets dog+litter+box potty+training dogs

Fewd

My refrigerator is the final resting place for nutrients meant to end up as part of someone's body. I go to the store with no clear plan, wander up and down the aisles, choose items in a random way, pay, go home, carry into the house only those purchases likely to go bad if not refrigerated, stuff all that into the fridge, and forget it. Then a few days later I may remember something in the fridge long enough to fix and eat it, but not usually. Usually what happens to things in my fridge is that they decay. When I open the door and the smell knocks me over, I realize that it's time to get a garbage bag and evict some compost. Once in a long time, if I have company coming over, I may open the fridge and squirt a little Windex around, push a paper towel through dried-on juice, meat goop, crumbs, rotten vegetation, etc.

So this sounds as though I don't eat, which would mean that I'm thin, which would not be factual. I eat food that pours out of cans or that goes into the microwave in the package it wore upon arrival. I buy lots and lots of fruit and vegetables and then I let it all rot. Why? I don't know. Maybe I'm crazy?

What about the things I paid for but didn't even carry into the house? Well, they stay in the trunk of my car until I desperately need them. It's a safe bet that at any time you open the trunk of my car, you will be able to see paper towels, toilet paper, canned soup and spaghetti, every known variety of diet soda, light bulbs, printer paper, dried noodles, dill pickle flavored chips, tuna, dog food, etc, etc. Why? I don't know. Crazy. Crazy.

Why would I even tell on myself in a blog like this? Good question and here are three answers. One: should you be in need of any of the items you now understand to be pretty much permanently available in the trunk of my car, flag me down and help yourself. I may be crazy, but I'm generous. Two: suppose I were on my way from point A to point B when for some reason my car refused to continue, leaving me stranded away from home. If you happen to be a friend of mine living at point B and expecting me to arrive, say, at 10:00 A.M., when I failed to arrive by 5:00 P.M. you might begin to worry about me except that you'd say to yourself, "This isn't serious. She could survive for a month on the supplies in the trunk of her car." Three: in case you ever need just about enough compost to fill a largish planter, you can always get what you need by bravely opening my refrigerator and removing fruit and vegetables that never made it onto the menu.

Test

Testing, three, eight, fourteen.