Other Than That, My Winter Vacation Was Okay...

You know the old joke where someone says, ‘But Mrs. Lincoln, other than that, how did your enjoy the play?’ That was my winter vacation.

My elderly, handicapped mom lives in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. Alone. This is obviously not the best idea during the winter.

Last fall I cooked up a brilliant plan.  Every year my stable goes to the desert to compete at the winter horse show circuit in Thermal, CA.  This year I’d compete for three weeks, and rent a house for four. Mom loves the desert and for reasons that escape me, the Salton Sea. The weather would be good for her arthritis and I’d get to show. Win, win.

I thought my biggest problem would be finding a handicapped accessible house that would allow four dogs (mom was bringing her Silky Terrier,

Monte).  But after a few phone calls, a huge hunk of money for the rent and a dog/cleaning deposit exchanged hands and we had a lovely place.

We didn’t exactly travel light. Among the stuff cramming my SUV were two enormous dog beds, two crates of dog food, a dog crate, mom’s walker, sundry other objects, the two males dogs and finally, mom.

It took some maneuvering to get mom into the vehicle-  it’s too tall for her to enter easily, which is why I actually rented a small SUV for her three months in California – but with some shoving and pushing, she was in and we were on our way.

The idea was for me to drop off mom and the stuff, and return to Los Angeles to exchange cars and pick up the girl dogs. Just a simple six hour round trip. And then three more hours back. I’ve done worse.

It went like clockwork. We arrived at the house by noon. I quickly unpacked and dropped off mom and the two dogs and left. I forgot to close the garage, but I’d get it when I returned for the night.

I’d forgotten that moving day was Friday and got stuck in traffic on the way back to the desert.  By 8pm the girls and I were hungry, cranky and we all had to pee, but I kept driving.

We were almost there when Mom called. Apparently the neighborhood security patrol spotted the open garage and sprang into action. They entered the unlocked house and found her happily watching tv with both dogs snoring at her feet. After the guards gave mom a stern warning about safety, they locked the gate, doors and windows and closed the garage before leaving. Lesson learned.

Sunday we packed up all the dogs into the little SUV, and looking like a canine clown car we drove to Joshua Tree National Park. It had rained a bit and was beautiful in the way that deserts are after a rain. Everything was on the verge of blooming and it was fresh and clean. This was going to be a great trip.

My horse, the fabulous Wes, had arrived and was, as always perfect. We’d been a bit worried because he’d gotten cast in his stall a week earlier and tweaked his back, but there didn’t seem to be any lasting effects. My trainer showed him on Wednesday and he was amazing. Thursday I had a brief lesson and he was awesome.

Friday was my first day showing. I was nervous because, well, I’m always nervous. Also, I hadn’t jumped in three weeks because of his back and I hadn’t showed since July when I’d broken my foot. Other than that, we were ready.

I was truly terrible in my first class, but we got around, which was the goal. When I came out of the ring my hand ached, but I ignored it. The second and third classes we rocked, but by the fourth my hand was really hurting.

After I finished and picked up a second place ribbon, I decided to stop by the paramedics and have them look at my now swollen hand. I figured that they’d laugh and send me on my way. They didn’t.

“I’ve broken my hand six times,” drawled one of them, which raised a lot of questions, none of them medical. “That’s broken.”

“How? I never left the horse? I just twisted my hand while we were jumping!” He just sadly nodded his head while his partner Googled the closest urgent care.

The doctor  confirmed that my hand was indeed broken. They thought it was insane when I begged them to splint it so I could ride, but they did it.

I was there to show, and I was going to show, damn it. Did I mention it was my left hand, and I'm left handed?

The next day I arrived at the show early enough to con one of the grooms into taping my hand so I could shove it in a riding glove. “It’s just like bandaging a horse,” I begged him. He finally gave in. 

I got on Wes and warmed up. He felt great and we were clicking. When we’re like that we are truly unbeatable; the pile of blue and championship ribbons in my office are proof.

We entered the ring and the first six jumps were great. We entered the last line and he looked into the stands, which is bizarre since Wes never did things like that. Then he spooked and ran to the right. 

 I couldn’t hold him straight. I turned him back to the jump and he was worse. There was nothing I could do, so I left the ring.

My trainer got on him and Wes pitched a fit: running out of jumps, leaping around and bolting. Totally un-Wes-like behavior. It only got worse.  She rode him for an hour before he calmed down.

Wes was the perfect amateur horse. Lazy to a fault, he was also predictable. Once every three months he’d be wild, Crystal would get on him and fifteen minutes later he’d get over it and be perfect again. This was definitely unusual.

After another week of him veering between perfection and insanity, I had two vets check him from head to hoof. They found nothing.

I decided to send him to a clinic that specializes in equine orthopedics and neurology in San Marcos.  The night before he left Crystal called me. Apparently one of the grooms had been handwalking Wes and he bolted and nearly ran into a tractor. For the first time ever, we were going to drug him to put him on the trailer. We didn’t want him to hurt himself.

I don’t know why, but I knew then that he wasn’t coming home.

Still, I kept hoping that the vets would find something that we could fix. Wes had all the standard neuro and soundness tests on Monday. The vets found nothing.  On Tuesday they did full body scan, looking to see if anything would light up. It didn’t. The doctors were perplexed.

The next morning, a world-famous neuro specialist, took another look. He repeated the test from Monday, but it was as if it was a completely different horse. Wes was wildly, dangerously neurological and it was terrifying him.

My vet called to break the news that night. I don’t remember much of the conversation. Mostly I heard the noise the adults make in the Peanuts cartoons: “Waaa waaa waaaa!”

I made the horrible decision to put him down.

But I had to say goodbye. I packed up mom and the dogs and drove from La Quinta to San Marcos.  It doesn’t look very far on the map, but believe me, it’s an eternity. The closer we got, the slower I drove.

Eventually, despite my efforts, we got to the clinic. I wandered around the barn calling him, but Wes didn’t reply; a bad sign. I found him, and entered the stall clutching ten pounds of carrots and a pocketful of peppermints. He spooked and cowered at the back of the stall. After a moment or two he recognized me and bustled over to give me a push and beg for a peppermint.

He had never looked better. He was glossy, fat and appeared to be the picture of health. I patted him, and said goodbye. He whinnied at me when I left. We drove back to La Quinta pretty quietly.

I wanted mom to have a little fun. Up till now it had been doctor and vet appointments almost every day. So few days later we drove (with all the dogs) to the Salton Sea. It is an inland, man-made ocean in the middle of the desert and it’s pretty spectacular. As long as you stay in the car.

Because of the drought, and some other issues, the Sea has near-constant, massive fish die-offs. The beaches are littered with dead fish. Naturally, it stinks. Badly.

But the dogs still needed to pee, I took them for a short walk. As I was loading them back in the car, Rocky made a break for it. He smelled the fish and had a plan. He’s an old dog, with a touch of dementia, but when he decides to move, he’s gone. With a glint in his eye, he bolted toward a pile of rotting fish. Just as he started to fling himself in down, I tackled him. I’m not proud of it, but it had to be done. I did carry him back to the car.

A few days before we were scheduled to leave La Quinta, at 4am, the smoke detector started going off. I stumbled around and found the faulty one, but with my broken hand, I couldn’t get the little battery out. For the next six hours, every 45 seconds or so - just long enough to think it had stopped – a loud metallic beep went off.

I called the rental firm and left a message, and then went back to sleep with a pillow over my head. At 7 I got a phone call.” Did I own an orange and white dog named Poppy?” I did. “Well, she was running up and down the street and had nearly been hit by a car.”

One of the selling points of this house was that it had a lovely front and back yard surrounded by an eight foot brick wall. Poppy is a medium sized dog.  I pondered that as I jumped into some clothing and went to fetch her.

As soon as we got back into the house and she heard the alarm, Poppy went berserk. She leaped on top of a grill beside the fence and nimbly hopped into the neighbor’s yard and ran down the street. After 45 minutes of chasing, l packed her and Dalai into the car in the quiet, cool garage and called the rental agent again.

It was time to go home.

That was how I spent my winter vacation.

                                                                                                                                                 

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?