Good-bye Maud Ann

                My aunt, Maud Ann Sullivan passed away last week. She wasn’t famous, or a celebrity. Technically, she wasn’t even my aunt. She was my late uncle’s longtime companion, and though they loved each other deeply, they never married.

               

                It didn’t matter.  Maud Ann has been an integral part of my life as long as I can remember, and I feel privileged to count her as family. I am lucky that for some reason she felt the same way.

                

               Maud Ann was a role model to me. A single career woman long before that was the norm, she worked her way up from a telephone operator to managing and supervising a large staff. Many of her former staff stayed close to until her death. She was that kind of a lady.

                

             And make no mistake about it, Maud Ann was a lady. I never saw her less than perfectly coiffed and made-up. She rarely cursed and when she did it was with vehemence and usually saved for a Republican. The Presidents Bush were each always referred to as “that damned man.”

                

             But she was a lady in a Maggie Smith, Downton Abbey-kind of way. She also had strong opinions and a wicked sense of humor and was not afraid to share them. She never, ever suffered fools gladly. If she’d been a Southern lady, her favorite expression would have been “bless their heart.”

Maud Ann never called herself a feminist, but she most certainly was one. She assumed that one did what one had to do and went on with it regardless of your sex. That meant if you had to work, you worked. And as a working woman, the ERA was just common sense and the people who objected were boneheads. Bless their hearts.

She adored Hilary Clinton for her successes, abilities and toughness. It breaks my heart that Maud Ann didn’t live long enough to see our first serious woman presidential candidate go the distance. (We don’t even want to discuss what she thought of Sarah Palin.)

                

             Maud Ann never treated me like a stupid little kid, though certainly when I first met her, I was. She asked me my opinions, and listened thoughtfully when I pontificated about them. She also argued with me when I was wrong.

                

             A life-long liberal, she helped shape my political views and moral center. She loved this country as much as she loved her family, and despaired the rise of the loud-mouth, right wing and Tea Party.  She was deeply, personally offended by Donald Trump and his ilk.

               

               “I worry about the future of this country,” she told me recently when we spoke of gun violence and the rise of the lunatic right-wing. “We’ve been through this before.”

                

                  Indeed. She was a child of both the Depression and was shaped by the horrors of World War II, and took the phrase “Those who don’t learn from the past are destined to repeat it.”

               

               She was kind and thoughtful beyond belief, and never forgot a birthday, anniversary or holiday, sending cards for all occasions. Those notes went to everyone she loved, and some who just happened part of her extended and adopted family). She accepted all of the Liveten family (including a few who probably didn’t deserve the honor) as part of her family, as we did her.

                

              That meant that whether she wanted to or not, she attended all of my graduations, our family bar mitzvahs, weddings and reunions. While I bitch and moan about going to those events, Maud Ann just smiled and showed up. She might make a few sly comments when we spoke later, but at the time, when it counted she was always completely charming.

                

              After I’d been in California a few years, she and my mother came out to visit and we drove to Death Valley. I was not at my best and poor Maud Ann was treated to a week of mom and I, kvetching at one another in the middle of a desert where there was no real escape. To her great credit Maud Ann never told me to shut up and behave, though she must have wanted to. Desperately. I shudder when I think back at that week.

                 

               Maud Ann was a devoted Catholic, though she didn’t turn a blind eye to the Church’s failures. After the priest abuses came to light, she who had donated money to the Archbishop’s fund her entire life, wrote a stern answer to a fundraising request explaining why she would no longer be giving money to the church and instead, donating directly to the charities. A lot of people might say that, Maud Ann actually followed through.

Her faith helped her through all the challenges in her life.  She was a young woman when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and went through a radical mastectomy.  She never discussed it with me, or complained.  She later told me that she didn’t want to worry me. And that was that.

                

             Even recently, when she was ill with kidney disease, she never complained to me. I’d be on the phone – we spoke almost every week- whining about a cold or a sniffle or something equally ridiculous, and she’d lend a sympathetic ear. But if I asked about her declining health, she’d change the subject. Or dismiss it.

                

             My mom, who is not in the best of health, is staying with me this winter, which Maud Ann thought was a terrific idea. Unfortunately that means neither of us could attend Maud Ann’s funeral. 

A friend told me that she always liked Maud Ann the best of my extended family. My friend was right, she was. I miss her desperately and I always will.

The Five Stages of Musical Grief

I made a horrible discovery recently and I’m terribly traumatized by it.

I can tell the difference between Selena Gomez and Demi Lovado and Elle Goulding. Oh. My. God. I feel dirty.

You may think I’m over reacting, but to me this is both a tragedy and a huge personal failing.

 I am literally going through the five stages of grief.

It starting when  I was sitting in my car at a light, minding my own business listening to NPR, as one does. A 20-something pulled up next to me with her windows down.  She was blasting KIIS-FM and chair-dancing to “Cool for the Summer.”  I started singing along. Loudly. I might have even done a little dancing too.

Then I realized what I was doing. Enter stage 1: denial.

I was so horrified I immediately started changing my radio channels wildly. Desperately I searched for the anti-Lovado, but I couldn’t find The Replacements anywhere. I began shaking badly and was still hitting buttons when the car behind lost patience and blew its horn. The light had changed and I hadn’t noticed or cared.

Didn’t that idiot driver realize this was an emergency of epic proportion? I know the words to a Demi Lovado song? It’s in my head!!!

Okay, I admit I’m a music snob. As a  rock critic, it’s pretty much a job definition. The whole point is to be able to tell the difference between good music (The Replacements, X, Courtney Barnett) and bad music (the aforementioned songbirds Lovado , Gomez and Goulding).

Enter stage 2. Anger.

 I am furious that this music is taking up space in my already somewhat cluttered brain. I absolutely can’t know this. It’s a mistake. A waste. It’s making me question everything.

As most of my compadres in the field as well as serious music lovers will testify, loving good music goes far beyond ‘liking’ a band or a song. It shapes everything in life.

Back in the day when I had a social life, I wouldn’t willingly spend time with anyone with terrible musical taste. It was a bigger crime even than wearing stone-washed jeans.

 Oh, I could forgive them an occasional Britney Spears tune.  “Oops, I Did It Again” and “Baby One More Time” are truly awesome pop tunes. They have catchy hooks and Brit’s voice was pretty good.

But long ago I decided that life is way too short to waste it with anyone who believed N’Sync was godhead, or that Mariah Carey rules. Anyone who actually own anything by Creed was automatically off the list. The good thing is that all my real friends, many of whom were in the business, agreed with me.

Over the years I’ve mellowed a bit, and have trained myself to tolerate people with crappy musical taste. I don’t mind that  acquaintances love Kelly Clarkson or actually care about who is yodeling on “The Voice.”. As long as they don’t talk about it.  Facebook often makes this difficult.

 I can’t get past the attitude that the current crop of pop princesses are passing along to their mostly female fans. Selena and Demi have obviously worked really hard, both as Disney stars and turning themselves into pop stars. They are nobody's fools. But they primarily sing about perfecting themselves for some schlumy guy who obviously doesn’t appreciate their fabulousness. Ever heard of feminism girls?

As someone who grew up listening to tough girls like Chrissie Hynde, Exene and Patti Smith, these girls and their followers break my heart. They really are better than this. At least I hope so.

Hence, stage 4: depression.

But as much as I deny it, some of these songs are really catchy. And “Confident” is awful, but at least Demi is trying to say something empowering. Right?

At this point it's  really important to me that I explain exactly why I know these terrible songs. 

Recently I had to drive a long distance at night. This is not part of my skill set. I get sleepy. Which is dangerous.  Somehow I discovered that if KIIS-FM was playing (this was during a free tryout for Sirius and they only provided a few stations, and KIIS was one) it made me angry enough to stay awake. 

After a lot of time with Ryan Seacrest I discovered a few things. One is that KIIS has a playlist of about eight songs. The other is that I am immune to whatever charms Mr. Seacrest holds.

I digress.

The good news is that I’ve figured out a way to make this okay. Enter stage 4: bargaining.

Now, if I accidently hear a pop song and find myself singing along,  I play some Courtney Barnett for a while. It makes me feel better.  Not only do I love her, but it works as a cleansing mechanism. She clears all that nasty saccharine and auto-tuning out of my brain. Thank goodness.

It’s taken a while but I’m almost through stage 5, acceptance.

I acknowledge that every era of music has its crap. When I was younger there were people who adored Donny and Marie Osmond.  There was that whole era of disco. And hair bands. I could go on but my tummy hurts thinking about it.

But, and this is important, in those days there was no such thing as auto-tuning. Bad singers were just bad. And good singers didn’t all sound weirdly alike.

I guess I’m not completely though the acceptance stage yet.

PS. I kinda really love The Weeknd. Except for the spelling. That annoys me.

I Have Reading OCD

   

 I am one of those lucky people who love to read.  I don’t mean just old magazines while I'm waiting in the doctor’s office, or the celebrity rags at the hair salon. (Though I LOVE those.)

     I genuinely love to read. Always have. I admit I was the pretentious kid who was reading Shakespeare in grade school, and thinking I understood it. I've always loved Salinger – except for “Catcher in the Rye.” Ptooey. Yuck.  How obnoxious and awful is Holden Caufield? I went to school with people just like him; I didn’t need to read his self-indulgent… oops, I digress.

     Anyway, you’d think that as much as I like to hide from the real world, I’d read a lot of fiction. You’d be wrong.  The thing is, while just about anyone can come up with an interesting idea that isn't enough.  Good fiction is really, really hard to write. Bad fiction, not so much.

     Nothing annoys me more than starting a book with a good premise and intriguing characters only to have it all fall apart halfway through. When that happens I’m pissed with the characters and furious with the writer for wasting my time.

     At this point a normal person would close the book and walk away. Not me. I have a weird tick where I absolutely cannot leave a book unfinished.

     Apparently I have reading OCD.  You know how people with regular OCD have to wash their hands a certain number of times, or check the lock on the door twice before leaving or they drive themselves crazy? That’s me with an unfinished book. I can’t ignore the unread pages.

     It’s like being in a bad relationship. I keep going back to the terrible book, knowing all the while that I’m going to be disappointed. I convince myself time and time again that it will get better. It never does.

     The latest example is the IT book of this season, ­City on Fire.  The story is very Bonfire of the Vanities,  (without the humor or  pizzaz), as it follows a group of characters through a moment in 80s era New York.

     Written by wonderkind Garth Risk Hallberg, it’s a first novel that netted the author something north of $2 million after a vigorous bidding war. With all that money invested, you’d think someone would have hired an editor to oversee the project. Again you’d be wrong. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the tome never went under a red pen.

    The City on Fire literally weighs in at Godzilla-like 700-plus pages. (I don’t know exactly; I bought it on by Kindle. The idea of schelpping a book that size around gave me pause.) But it’s not the length that forces me to put it away every night after just a few brief chapters. It’s the writing. It’s labored.

     When I was in school, I was always taught to aim for the brevity of Ernest Hemmingway. Mr. Hallberg must have missed that class. Where good ole’ Ernest was known be so tight with words that some chapters run barely a single page; Hallberg has never met a long flowery sentence he didn’t love. His descriptions run into tangents and he love, love, loves his SAT words.

     I love a good wordsmith, but constantly using terms that force me to constantly flip back and forth to a dictionary is lame and irritating. It not only takes me out of the story (which in this case is tangential enough without interruptions) but it’s condescending. We get it; you’re smart and know a lot of big words. Yay you.

     You get the point: I kind of hate this book. And yet, every night I chip away at it. I’m a fast reader, but I expect to be punishing myself with City on Fire for at least another month. Ugh.

     I love non-fiction. I ‘m convinced that just like a bad merlot is better than a bad cabernet, bad non-fiction better than bad fiction. It’s hard for even the worst writer to make fascinating people dull.  Even though god knows they try.

     Recently I’ve hit a vein of terrific non-fiction, some of which has even popular.  I’ll read anything from Bill Bryson (some is better than others), Jon Krakauer (don’t hold the film “Everest” against him) and Erik Larson (I never thought about the Lusitania or the world’s fair before his books). Those are just some of the great ones.

    I’ve also read terribly written, but really interesting books about flappers, stand-up comedy, Alan Turing, First Ladies, the Roosevelts, hummingbirds and rock and roll managers.  You get the drift.

Some of them were painfully bad.  All could have been made better with good editing. But they were still worth reading.  And yes, I finished them all.

     Currently I have a backlog of books waiting to be read, including some fiction.  I’m sure that by the time I finish slogging through City on Fire the list will be even longer.  According to my Kindle, I’m only 310 pages deep of 903. Which means I should be done sometime after the first of the year. 

Happy Holidays Y'all!

    Lately I’ve been feeling like an outsider in my own country. Since I'm white, female and Jewish that may seem ridiculous.

   I’m second generation on one side; third on the other. When people ask me what I am, I tend to stand there for a second with a blank expression and say, “Um, American?” before I realize they want to know where my grandparents and great-grandparents emigrated from.

   That would have been Russia. Because they were Jews, and not generally loved there they fled to a safer place: America. It wasn’t easy (my Papa Ike arrived speaking barely any English with little money and fewer contacts) they survived and most became valuable, if not valued members of society. (They were still Jewish after all.)

   By the time I came along, the Livetens had settled in a liberal university town in New England.  I went to a school bursting with diversity. My best friends in grade school were a rainbow of races and religions.

   I guess I grew up naïve. Not only did I think everyone had great museums, art galleries and theater in their towns, but I had little exposure to racism and religious bigotry.  It was great.

   Until the first time I someone called me a kike.  At first I didn’t even know what it meant.  I’d been called a lot of names - fatso, shorty, four-eyes. You know, the usuals, but I’d never been attacked for my beliefs. Especially since I didn’t really know what I believed, being more a cultural Jew than a practicing one.

   Because it didn’t happen to me often, I could shove it to the back of my mind and move on. But it still occupies real estate there.

   Which is just one of the multitude of reasons I’m so appalled by the current GOP landscape. 

   Granted, neither Ben “Loosewiththefacts” Carson or Donald “Imnotaracist” Trump have used the slang words for the people they hate. They’ve done worse: they encouraged their followers to do so.. And more.

   Pro-immigrant activists and Hispanics have been attacked at Trump rallies. The Donald’s response is that his fans are “enthusiastic.”  He says it with a grin. He makes me shudder with fear.

   I don’t think I’m being overdramatic, and I don’t really care if I am, but that’s what people thought about those nasty Hitler followers. They were just passionate believers. Wearing ugly brown outfits.

   Currently there are a handful of GOP candidates and millions of registered voters who fervently believe that only straight male Christians should be President. It is one reason why Obama-haters passionately insist that he is Muslim.  It would be damaging politically to admit that they hate him because he’s black (or as Rupert Murdock insinuates, a “bad” black man as opposed to Carson’s “good black man”), but it’s okay to hate him for his religion.

   Silly me. I thought the good ole USA was founded on religious freedom. It’s in the Constitution. You know, that document that the right wing likes to quote, but has apparently never read.

   This week, just in time for the latest GOP ‘debate’ the crazies have trotted out their annual “war against Christmas” campaign. It appears every year about the same time that retailers drag out their holiday decorations. And like the decorations, it comes out earlier and earlier.

   I’ve been hearing clerks and friends wish me a Merry Christmas since I was old enough to understand. I always assumed that it was a friendly greeting, a seasonal version of  “have a nice day.” 

   When some people switched to “happy holidays” I didn’t give it much thought. It’s more inclusive and more, dare I say it, Christian of them, to acknowledge other people’s celebrations. It was nice.

   Apparently I was wrong. It was the sign of the coming apocalypse.

   The latest kerfuffle is about Starbucks cups. Apparently the red and green colors aren’t Christmas-y enough. The old ones had snowflakes and skates on them, which I didn’t realize were traditional Christian symbols. I’ve been in a lot of churches over the years and spotted nary a skate or a snowflake. Maybe they hide them in the back.

  I realize that the cup issue is really just a cover for something far more nasty and insidious.

   Maybe I’m still naïve. I honestly believe that my Jewish grand-nieces and nephews, and my Muslim and Buddist friend’s kids and grandchildren have a right to be leaders in this country. Just as my LGBT friends do.

   What this cup hysteria has done is make me realize that while pockets of the country have grown more and more open and accepting there’s a huge swath of people who are angry at their own failures and problems. Those people are just looking for a place to plunk the blame.

   Those haters zone directly onto folks they see as others: people with different religions and customs and sexuality.  Those haters complain that they are just being true patriots, and are defending their country from people who would destroy it.

   But isn’t the greatest thing about America that it welcomes others? Isn’t that what the whole wonderful ‘melting pot’ is supposed to be about?

  I thought it was. I hope it is. I believe it is.

   As for my celebrations this season? I’m looking for a giant inflatable rubber duck that lights up at night.

  Happy holidays y’all!

Just Call Me the Grim Reaper

Every once and a while you read about some Mensa reject who managed to blow up his house by igniting too many flea foggers. I used to laugh at them. Not any more.

Now I understand. Those poor folks have been driven mad by the neverending onslaught of pests that they will literally do anything to rid their place of the plague, even if it means they may destroy their homes.

I envision the homeowner being interviewed on TV. They’re covered with soot but  gleefully proclaiming, “Yeah, the house is gone, but so are the fleas!  Winner!”

Currently I do not have a bug problem. (That sound you hear is me knocking wood, lighting a candle and doing a preventative interpretive dance.)  Actually my problem is worse. I have mice. 

Over the years I’ve grown accustomed to the occasional rodent.  My barn is within spitting distance of the house, and where there is hay and grain, there are mice.  It was never a big problem before. Usually Poppy the Brittany dispatched them quickly, and that was the end of that.

Not this year. I’m not sure if it’s the four-year drought or something else, but word seems to have spread among the mouse population that there’s good eating at the Liveten household. 

It began when I noticed Poppy staring raptly at the kitchen broiler. She sat for hours, watching intently, still as the proverbial mouse.  The next day I noticed that the cover that is supposed to protect the leather couch from dogs was rolled up. When I straightened it, a mouse fell out. It was quite dead.

I was understandable startled and a little grossed out, but I praised Poppy, picked up the mouse with a plastic bag and dumped it in the trash outside. I figured I was done.  I was so naïve.

Poppy was not. That day she was hanging out by the canary flight cage, refusing to budge. After assuring her that there was no mouse, I proudly moved the cage to show her. A mouse tore out. Unfortunately Poppy misjudged her prey and was stalking the rear of the cage while the mouse sprinted to the closet from the front.

Obviously, Poppy needed reinforcements. My cat was useless. Not only is she confined to her own room for her safety, she gave up mousing the day she moved into Chez Liveten.

Killing anything is an anathema to me. I’ve been a vegetarian for more than twenty years. I once hit a pigeon with my car and it still haunts me. But this was getting ridiculous. I kept thinking I saw mice everywhere. Maybe I was.

In general I like rodents. I had hamsters and gerbils as a kid, and I think mice are adorable. Where they belong. In their natural habitat. Which is outside.

At the store I by-passed the disgusting snap traps and the inhumane glue boards. Instead I shelled out $29 for a wee little wire have-a-heart trap. They don’t kill the animal, so you can release back to the wild.

That night I baited the trap with peanut butter (mice, apparently are fools for the stuff) and set it up in back of the bird cage and happily went to bed.  After mere moments I heard a snap.

I leaped up  and smugly ran to the kitchen. In the cage was a teeny, furious brown mouse with a glossy coat.  I may have even whistled a little as I brought it behind the barn and gently tipped the creature onto a pile of leaves.

Just to be on safe side, I set the trap up again. I caught three mice that night.  It may have even been the same mouse. They all look alike, so I can’t say for sure.

What I do know is that the by the time morning came I was a new person.  A blood thirsty one.  Cute little noses and tiny pink feet no longer had the power to move me. I wanted them dead. All of them. And their families too.

I went back to the store for weapons. I still wouldn’t buy glue traps and poison is out,  since poisoned mice go outside and can be eaten by birds or my dogs.  But I bought so many snap traps that the woman behind the register

eyed me suspiciously as if she thought I was going to sneak them in Halloween candy.  As if I’d waste precious mouse traps on children!

As soon as I got home I set them up. One in the kitchen, one in the closet and one behind the birdcage. I went to bed warmed by the thought that the mice were going to be gone from my life. I even dreamed about the little suckers.

In the morning I checked the traps carefully. The mice had somehow licked the peanut butter off and escaped the traps. I was enraged. I swear I heard the damn things laughing at me.  Apparently I was now feeding them.

Cursing loudly, I reset the traps, carefully smearing the peanut butter all over the bait surface.  This. Was. War!

That afternoon Poppy snagged another one.  Eventually I caught one in a trap. And then another. Right now about half the time I catch them, and the rest of the time they lick the trap clean. But the body count is growing.

I’m not exactly winning the war, but between Poppy and I, we’re holding our own. But honestly, if I thought a flea fogger would kill mice, I’d buy so many you’d see me on the evening news.

My Pets Are Trying to Kill Me

My pets are trying to kill me. Not in a “Kujo” kind of way, that would be far too obvious. They're more subtle than that. Which is why I want it on record that if I go missing the animals did it.

Most likely I’ll break my neck tripping over one of them. Or I’ll be smothered in my sleep when a Great Dane rolls on me during a nightmare. It’s also possible that the sheer weight of them all jumping on the bed at once will collapse it, and we’ll all be crushed.

Recently  the quadrupeds have opted for a slower, more stealth method. They’re going to worry me to death.

For instance, Lucy, my mama horse stopped eating. Oh, she was hungry. She just couldn't eat.

She’d grab some hay (or carrots, or even peppermints) and roll them around until they were chewed and slobbery. Then she’d spit them out. 

This is not normal. Lucy loves her food.  A lot. She is what you might call 'big boned.' Like me; she’s never intentionally missed a meal. When Lucy doesn't eat, it's big.

The first vet went for the simplest excuse and checked her teeth. Since horses’ teeth can become sharp and painful, this made a lot of sense.  Except, of course, they were fine. So was her temperature and blood work.  

The second vet delved a little deeper.  Literally.  She strapped on a head lamp, drugged Lucy and shoved a medieval- looking brace in her mouth to keep it open. Then the doc stuck her head in. Way, way at the back, far from any teeth was a giant, nasty ulcer.

Lucy lives in a field with a bunch of other broodmares and easily could have chomped on sometthing that cut her mouth.  A burr might have even been buried in her hay. 

The confounding thing was that Lucy had little sensitivity around the sore. But with no other leads we focused on the ulcer as the source of the problem. 

Because she still wasn't eating, Lucy was locked in a stall for the first time in three years. That should have sent her in a dither. When she couldn't work for a day she used to stand her stall and buck. Now she just stood around and looked miserably at her hay.

She would eat soaked hay pellets. In fact ,she loved them and regularly dived head-first into her bucket emerging covered from nose to forehead in fast-drying goop. 

Meanwhile the mouth ulcer wasn’t shrinking at all. We put her on anti-inflammatories and  pain killers to see if would encourage her to eat. All that did was irritate her ulcers (did I mention that my girl is a delicate flower?).  The result was that she wasn't eating and had a belly ache. Not exactly progress.

By the third week, the vet had conferenced with colleagues at her clinic, the Davis Veterinary School and pretty much everyone she knew. No one had any ideas.

Nothing was changing for the better. The ulcer was still huge, Lucy still wouldn't eat hay and the muscles on the left side of her jaw were atrophying.  It was time to do a biopsy. Horses don’t often get mouth cancer , but it’s not unheard of, especially given Lucy’s age: 17.

Naturally, getting a tissue sample was problematic.  The ulcer was so far in the back of Lucy’s mouth that the vet was practically doing headstands while trying to get a suitable sample. Even with two of us holding up Lucy’s drugged and braced head, it took three tries. Eventually she got something and shipped it off to the state vet for examination.

As time went on I convinced myself that Lucy was going to die. Lucy never has small things go wrong. Her problems were always huge. She never was lame; she tore two suspensories. She never colicked; she had a impaction and surgery. She couldn’t possibly have a cut mouth it had to be cancer.

When I drove out to visit her a few days after the biopsy I was bracing for the worst. When I'd last seen Lucy she looked awful; she was skinny, her coat was bad and her eyes were dull.

But as I stepped out of my car Lucy and started to holler for me. (She is named after the Peanut’s character Lucy Van Pelt, because when she first arrived she never stopped talking.) Then she demanded some soft peppermints and ate them with ease without spilling a drop.

By Saturday she was chomping down two flakes of hay a day.  Sunday she went to a small turn-out where she bucked and played and otherwise made a fool of herself. Like normal.

The biopsy was negative so we still have absolutely no idea what was wrong.

My theory is that she thought I was spending too much time with her baby and ignoring her, and decided to shake me up a bit. If that was the case, it worked.

I’ve been eyeing her ulcer medication with curiosity. It might just make my now-chronic stomach ache go away, right?

Living the Wild Life in Mill River Massachusetts

I was recently in the Berkshire’s for my annual summer trip East to see the Travers horse race. Er, I mean I went to visit my mom.  Usually I get in a couple of days before the race and leave a few days later. It’s a short and sweet trip.  Not this time.

This year, my nephew got married the weekend before the Big Day. (Silly kid. He thought his wedding was the big day. Maybe to him. But not compared to Triple Crown winner American Pharoah running in the “Summer Derby.”) Anyway, I was there for a while.

               

           Mom lives on about 160 acres in Western Massachusetts filled with flora and fauna. That’s because unlike California, it rains there. It’s downright lush. Grass, flowers you know, green stuff.

                

            There’s also a lot of actual wildlife.  Living in Los Angeles, the only wild animals I see are an occasional coyote or deer. And that skunk that lives next door…  But in Mill River, Mom has wild animals just outside her window.  Sometime even bears.

I’ve never seen a bear, but I usually to visit with the flock of wild turkeys that live in the upper pasture and a deer or two in the front yard. One year there was a giant porcupine happily pigging out on the downed apples in the orchard.  Unfortunately a rabies outbreak wiped out the raccoons years ago but that’s another story.

Last year was a complete wash-out, critter-wise. I didn’t even see a single deer.  Nada. I settled for some chipmunks and a small red squirrel stuffing themselves at the bird feeders. Oh, and a rhino on “Animal Planet.”

I hoped this year would be different. Be careful what you wish for.

The second evening I was driving home in the pitch black, since there are no street lights here. Heck, there’s barely a street . Anyway, something slinked across the road in front of me.  After I slammed on the brakes,  a gorgeous, healthy, red fox glared at us for a couple of moments before it moved on. Nice.

The next evening at dusk I looked out the front window and a couple of adolescent deer were peacefully munching in the field. Most still had their spots. They were adorable. Sigh. I was in my happy place.

The excitement came later that night in the middle of a serious thunderstorm.   Rain! Lightening! Thunder! Lots of thunder. Whee! Having not seen rain in months, I was delighted.

 Mom’s little dog Monty, not so much. When the thunder cracks, so does his composure. He shakes, whimpers and becomes totally pathetic.  A few drops of Rescue Remedy usually helps him regain his dignity.  Usually.

I  was dead asleep at 3:30 A.M. when mom when woke me up. Apparently the ongoing storm pushed Monty beyond the help of Rescue Remedy.  Way beyond.  When he gets like that, mom stuffs him in a closet until the storm passes. There are pillows in there and he can’t hear the thunder.  He must like it; he stays inside and goes to sleep until the storm passes. She needed my help to get him inside.

“Oh,” she mentioned casually. “There’s also a bat flapping around.”

A bat? I glanced around and I didn’t see any bat. I figured mom was just getting loopy in her old age.

Um, no. 

The next evening I was on the phone when a bat the size of a California Condor swooped lazily through the living room. The house has low ceilings and his appearance produced a fair amount of ducking and screeching. All from me. 

My 84 year-old-mother observed Dracula calmly.  “I told you there was a bat. He is a big one isn’t he?”

My friend on the phone, safely back in California, googled “Bat in the house” (the farm internet is spotty) and relayed instructions. They were useless. Finally the monster made its way onto the screened porch. I slammed the doors to the house, opened the screens and hoped for the best.

I’m sure all the noise made the bat desperate to return to the great and quiet outdoors; we haven’t seen him since. Just in case, I kept those doors shut tight for four days. Just to be on the safe side.

A couple of days later mom and I were driving through the little town of Caanan on the way to Brooklyn for the day.  Naturally there was road work, and traffic was at a stand-still.  Directly in front of us was a small pickup. No biggie.

Until a a pigeon head craned out of the truck bed and looked around. Up popped another. And then another. They were quite lovely, shiny and iridescent and gawking at their surroundings.  

Mom and I gaped. You don’t often see a truck full of pigeons. Especially ones staring at you.

With traffic stopped, the driver and got out. He shot mom and me a grin a bed and waved his arms at the back of the truck. A dozen pigeons took off.  He motioned again and more flew out. It was like a clown car except full of pigeons. They flew a lofty circle overhead and took off.

Homing pigeons. Hmm. 

Anyway I'm back in Los Angeles. I saw a deer today at the stables.

Oh, and the Travers was great. Other than American Pharoah losing.