Dog sitting. I sit in the semi-dark dining room of the Vedas' house. The windows face the back of some business across the street, and there is little traffic, motor or pedestrian. Though I know it is hot outside, the breeze from the open window and the fans inside is pleasant.
The two cartoonishly large greyhounds sprawl on their SoftSpots in the living room, in front of the fan. I just met them two days ago. Henry barked outrageously at me when I first came in, but I kept talking to him and gave them each a cookie, and he seemed to remember me from the other night. Now it seems to be business as usual, sacking out through the heat of the day. No wonder they're up at 4:30am. I don't expect to get a lot of sleep. I can go home in the afternoons and take a nap, as I live five minutes from here.
To give myself something to do, I've brought my palm and my guitar, and a new song I've been working on. I've made some set list notes, chipped away unproductively at a couple of lyrics, and sat with my initial uneasiness at being with two big dogs who don't know me well yet. I don't know why I'm nervous about this gig, unless it's only that. The fellas aren't used to being minded by anyone else. It's only about 48 hours though. Two overnights. Anyone can do that.
I have to sleep in the Vedas' bed. That's also weird. Not that I don't sleep in a lot of strange beds on the road, but this is their bed. At least one dog typically sleeps in it as well. Tim and Bet make love there and have deep conversations. I feel like an intruder. My bed is five minutes down the road. It's made and ready for me to come back.
Tim gets up very early -- 5:30. Kevin, the brindle, likes to wake up about 4:30 and start playing. (Who names their dog Kevin?) Kevin is about 5, and Henry is either 9 or 11, depending on which Veda you believe. They're both rescues from the racetrack. At least I'm not nannying kids, I think to myself. The O'Briens' daughter down the street from my sister got a summer job nannying, in between school terms. I never liked babysitting as a teenager. That job is certainly meant for someone else. But I'm trying to treat these two days as a mini-retreat, and besides, it's facilitating a nice, romantic, much-needed holiday for T&B. They're also picking up their daughter from a Buddhist retreat center in Vermont on the way back.
As long as Henry doesn't keep barking at me when I come in, it'll be okay.
I was going to go out this afternoon and do a couple of errands, but Kevin has to be penned in the kitchen, and they're sleeping so nicely now I hate to disturb him. Why not let them get used to me today? I'm either a terribly responsible person, way too compassionate for my own good, or else I'm just a fretting rabbit constantly looking for my gloves and fan.
Anyway, as I was doing this week's set list, I looked at my new songs that we've incorporated this year and I'm pleased. I'd really like to finish up a few more this summer. There might be one more having to do with Will, but my focus on that is changing and I'm not sure now what the message is. But there are some bits that I like, so I hope I can sew them together into a coherent whole.
And I tried to recreate from memory our complete list of songs, Carol's and mine, and I think I pretty much got them all. But I'm wondering if C. needs a retreat of her own. She's going to be tied up with her parents' house and move until the middle of August. Maybe after that we should arrange for her to have a few days to herself. However much I love my own songs, I'd feel uncomfortable with a whole new set when she has nothing. Especially when I know what an astounding writer she is.
That reminds me of another thing I want to broach. Our solo CDs aren't selling much any more, and I'd like to propose we start inserting a solo song or two in the evening, to perk up the interest. A song like Talking River should be in the rotation, but no one seems to know how to make it a band number. Frankly I wouldn't mind doing it alone, and the same goes for May Song (although that isn't recorded) -- Carol suggested, when we took a look at it for the band, that it might need some rewriting to make sense in a band context. But I don't want to touch it. It's perfect the way it is, but it is uniquely my story and I understand if they don't feel connected enough to do it. I'm sure there are songs of C's that fall into the same category, and there's no reason we couldn't take a solo turn (or duo, in their case) in a set, the way we used to when we didn't have enough material for the whole night.
Of course, with the new songs coming in, it's hard to cut back in any category to make room for solo songs, isn't it? We're lucky to have such a dilemma.
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I just found the cheese danish.
The last couple of days, I've been revisiting some of the old songs, which I had suddenly realized were getting VERY fuzzy. Talking River, May Song, Still Life, Ride. It Doesn't Matter and Reckless. These can't die. I wonder if this resurgence has anything to do with not writing in Diaryland for a while. It's the same urge, really, to express, to self-actualize, but now it's coming out in a different way. It feels good.
The day is cooling off a bit and I think rain is predicted, either for tonight or tomorrow. I'll feed the beasts at 5:30 like Tim said. Fortunately I'm already on Prednisone (for a bad flareup of sciatica), so shedding dogs in this proximity (and on the bed) shouldn't be a problem for my allergies. Tomorrow I have no band obligations, and only a couple of errands; Tuesday I have rehearsal, so will leave here around 11:00 and be back to feed dogs at 5:30 unless Tom calls and says they've come home already. I guess I'll take my stuff home on the way to Bloomfield that morning.
These dogs are so BIG. Maybe that's what unnerves me a little. Even for greyhounds, especially the white one, Henry. He reminds me of the cartoon dog in Triplets of Bellville, with a huge round body and stick legs. He's not that fat, but his legs are like branches, and they're so cute when he's sleeping on his pillow bed because they seem out of proportion to the rest of his bulk. He walks a little stiff-legged now, being older. His snout is inordinately long, almost prehensile. Almost a Rudolph nose. I asked Bet if she thought Henry would notice if I painted his nose red while he slept, and she said she didn't think so.
They don't have much money. (Tim and Bet, I mean. As far as I know, the dogs don't have any money at all.) Rose has told me this on a number of occasions. I look around their house and see what Bet has done on a budget. She's a designer, and helped Rose figure out their new Great Room when they got new furniture, painted, and put in a new bay window. I like her taste but there's a longing here to have more to work with -- money, mainly. When we had dinner here the other night, so I could meet the animals and Mike could set up their new computer, they told us the story of how they met and fell in love. It was very funny -- they seem so different from one another anyway, and when they first met in a bar, she didn't like him at all. She said he was arrogant and annoying. I gather he was heavily into drugs and alcohol at the time, which he later renounced in favor of a healthy relationship and body. There came a point where he confessed his deep feelings for her, and told her lots of things about his life -- a big confession -- including, for some reason, a story about a dog his family had had who got his head stuck in a discarded, industrial-sized mayonnaise tub and went tumbling down the hill into the woods before anyone could find him. His dad, or maybe his uncle, who was a boozer, went out in his underwear to look for him in the middle of the night, and also fell down the hill. We were laughing merrily over this as part of his overall love confession, and then she added that Tim had just eaten a burger or something, and he had ketchup stuck in the corners of his mouth all during the conversation. It touched her so much, this guy telling her all the missteps and misconduct of his life, all the family weirdness, and pouring out his feelings to her, unaware of the ketchup, that her heart just softened and overflowed. Well, what's not to love about that?
The dog was fine, by the way, aside from smelling a little funny.
Now Tim's a Buddhist, and he and my sister Rose met at the local UU when a few members would meet early Saturday mornings for sitting and walking meditation -- it began at 7:30 or some ridiculous hour, because that's when everybody had time to meet, so they called it the Pajama Sangha. Anyway, he's tall and gangly and high-shouldered, and hugging him is like hugging a bundle of coat hangers. Sweet but fairly serious. Bet is shorter, pixie-like, funny with just the right touch of sarcasm. Down to earth. I can't remember their daughter, though we've probably met at least once somewhere.
Rose stopped going to the UU some time last year, disgruntled by the membership's inability to make sensible and fairly straightforward decisions on things like using the money the old lady left to restore her donated vintage grand piano, to actually restore the vintage grand piano. Also, feeling very drawn to Buddhist teaching and practice, she wanted to focus more on that, and felt there wasn't enough of it to feed her at the UU. Now the sangha is Tuesday nights at her house. I've never made it yet, so I don't know how many come, but Tim's a regular practitioner.
Rose tends to get herself involved in so many projects that she can't maintain them for long. She befriended a family from Kosovo a year or two ago, who were forced to leave home because of war (they'd been living in their own basement for many months, as it was unsafe to come up). She and Mike visited them often, took their kids places, and gave a lot of time and help to them. But the father, who was a surgeon in Kosovo, had a lot of trouble adjusting to being here -- he couldn't or wouldn't pick up the language, and without it couldn't find work, so they lived on assistance from the church who brought them here, in a one-bedroom apartment -- with three teenagers and a new baby. The kids were picking up English at school, and the boys especially were getting very Americanized. One obviously had ADD, and the other seemed better off but I still felt sorry for him. The girl was only 12 and still very much mother's daughter. The mother, of course, was always home with the infant.
Over time, Rose fell out of touch with them. I wonder if she felt she could only do so much, with the language barrier and the father's refusal to accept being here so circumstances could not change for them. The culture is very different with them, too -- dad is the king of the household, and there's no way to tell him he needs to be doing things differently. Anyway I felt a little bad that she let them go, and so did Mike.
After adopting Lucy the Hound and Linus the Cat, she vounteered for a few weekends at her favorite new place, the Humane Society. Now that's giving way to newer choices and unexpected obligations. I can see it going the way of all things soon.
I don't think it's that she's flighty so much as overbooked. Or maybe she's a little flighty too.
********
Monday -- plenty o' Muttin' goin' on
Tim and Bet warned me that Kevin, the brindle, would get me up by 4:30. He tends to have accidents, so they said take him out when he insists. I went to bed a little after 11:00 last night, early for me, and he wanted to get into the bed, so I let him. It's a queen, plenty of room. Of course he's about the circumference of a small car when lying down, so I had a modest sized slice on one side. Everything was okay for about ten minutes, except for the pillow being too hard and my body not being able to cool off despite the open windows and fans running. Then Kevin started to chase rabbits.
They didn't tell me that he has rabbit dreams every ten minutes. He'll do the usual dog dream stuff; kick the nearest person in the back with his yard-long legs, jerk his head and try to yip. Every ten minutes. For about five minutes at a time. After about an hour of this I pulled the sheet and pillows off the bed and went out to the couch.
The couch isn't quite as long as a reclining person, at least not me. After several trips back and forth across the room, I managed to get the right window/fan arrangement, but I was still hot. Sweating. Soaking the hard pillow. Kevin came out of the bedroom and nosed my foot every fifteen minutes, wanting up, an impossibility. There wasn't even room for me on the couch. He settled down on the floor next to Henry, who had been zonked already since ten. It was now shortly after two. I picked up the bedding again and went back into the bedroom, placing a gate across the door. They'd said Kevin would whine if blocked out of the bedroom, but it was my last choice besides sleeping in the car.
Sure enough, before long he'd discovered I was no longer in the living room. When he came questioning I told him to go lie down somewhere.
I closed my eyes again. Soon there was an odd pinging, poinging sound. What the hell now --? I opened my eyes. From the bedroom I had a small view of the kitchen door. Henry was there sopping up the last of the water in his dish. Oh. More whining from Kevin. This went on until 4:45, when he decided he just HAD to go out. I got up and got dressed.
Happy Day! Oh, happy, happy day! Kevin was jubilant. He leapt around, tossing his plushy toys in the air and biting me in the stomach and bum. (I still have a couple of minor welts.) I took them out, fed them a few minutes early, made sure they had water, and went back to bed. And mostly shut the door.
I more or less slept until a little after eight.
Only one more night of this. I think my anxiety was neither an excess of compassion nor a white-rabbit syndrome. I think it was simply a premonition.
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Having said all that, though, yesterday was time well spent. I worked a lot on music, making headway on a thing or two. I keep hearing Carol's voice in my head saying, "You've gotta put in the time." It's true; most songs don't just come pouring out like coffee out of the pot. They require excavation with picks and masks.
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Incidentally, Will was unable to come to our July 3rd fete. His friend visiting from Seattle preempted other plans for the weekend; they had to drive to Rhode Island on Saturday. I was debilitated for a day when I found out. It was also the day I'd gotten in at 3am from a gig, so I wasn't well prepared to deal with the disappointment. In the end, since he wasn't coming and there were no menu considerations, we had the dinner down the street at the O'Briens', and watched the fireworks from their roof so we wouldn't have to fight the traffic at the college.
From the patio, the roof seemed like a fabulous idea. They'd seen the display from there before, though I hadn't been along then. We climbed out the upper bedroom window and walked across a slightly slanted roof section, then scooted down to the garage roof, which was a LOT more slanted, and crawled up to the apex. Suddenly I said, "Oh my GOD, I'm on a ROOF!" and tried for the first ten minutes to not think about the thousand ways of falling off. Aside from scuffling with a little anxiety (Ohmygod I'm on Prednisone, it's a nervoussystemstimulantWhatifIsuddenly faintorgetpalpitations? I'mnotmyselfafterallDon'tlookdown! Ohmygodthefireworkslooklikethey'reCOMING RIGHT AT US!!) it was okay, and I was a little proud of myself for sitting on the roof. And the fireworks, as usual, were great.
I'd brought a carrot souffle which was also great. And dad Liam, who teaches school but is also a nurse, told us about his trip to Montana to volunteer for a week at a clinic on a Native American reservation.
It was an amazing story. He gave us a lot of history first, about Custer and our infidelitous dealings with our predecessors. He specializes in wound care and hospice, but he was also handling the detox clinic for some of the time, and alcoholism is rampant. Early in the morning, people of all ages, kids, adults, old men, are literally staggering down the street, falling over drunk. The women didn't want to be examined by a man, nevermind a white man, one who has about 2" of hair (and the spirit is in the hair, so you don't cut it), and he could tell the men were ready for a fight. In their culture, they look at each other in silence before speaking. Why, I asked? To make sure they understand each other and to consider what they're going to say. It's not customary to ask direct questions of another, because it's rude; instead, Liam had to phrase his inquiry as a statement to get them to respond and to trust him. Instead of asking, "Do you have a problem with alcohol?" he would say, "Alcohol... is causing a lot of issues in your body right now." "Talk to me about your pain." I thought this was a beautiful, respectful way of communicating and I would like to consider it. To not be in a hurry to blurt out sentences just because there are so many in line to be heard.
Conditions on the reservation are horrible. Unemployment is around 80%; 10% of people have no running water at all. There's no work except occasional manual labor. To go to Billings to find a job means having a car and commuting 50 miles each way. Most can't do it. So they're stuck in a bad rut with not enough aid and not enough opportunity to improve their lives. It was sickening and sad to hear.
When Liam arrived, he learned the first day that the room in the trailer he thought he'd reserved was taken. There had been a pipe break in the town, and the water system is so old that when there's a break somewhere, the whole town gets shut off, so there was no water. An engineer had been called in and was willing to rent the room for the whole summer to work on replacing the water pipes, and since Liam was only a volunteer, they needed to take the paying customer. His first day's work was Saturday, and as the clinic was closed Sunday he drove to Billings and took a Motel 6 for the week. He spent Sunday touring Yellowstone, and was back at the reservation on Monday.
He'd gone on an open-ended trip, not knowing how long he'd stay at the clinic, but perhaps as many as three weeks. After a week of long commutes and pitiful conditions, he came home.
He'd learned many things in that week, among which was the well-known phrase, "It's a good day to die." I can't remember the N.A. words for it, but it was like "Ho-ka hay." he wrote it down on something in his pocket with the phonetic spelling, so he wouldn't forget it. He also bought a beautiful arrow and a couple of other souvenirs, and packed them carefully in his suitcase along with his stethoscope and a week's worth of dirty laundry for the return flight.
Once at the airport he had to change his ticket, so standing at the counter he pulled out the old ticket and gave it to the agent along with his ID. She looked at the ticket for a few moments, picked up the phone and said, "Could you send security down immediately?"
Security came and told him he'd been selected for random searching.
They looked through every bag, took his shaving kit apart, raised eyebrows when he told them he had an arrow in his suitcase, and to please be careful with it, as it was a fragile souvenir. They metal-scanned him half a dozen times, as he removed his shoes, his belt, his necklace, everything that beeped. He asked them what were the criteria of the search, how did they decide whom to select? They said, Oh, it's just random. He said, "It wouldn't have anything to do with the phrase "It's a good day to die," that I jotted on my old ticket, would it?" They laughed. Liam is hardly menacing. Finally they let him through. He said he was glad they were so careful; it made him feel safer.
********
I think it's stopped raining enough to walk the dogs.
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It wasn't a bad day, all things considered. I spent about three hours at home, checking email and reorganizing my music folder. My hosts got a call from a friend of Tim's; his brother has been in the hospital in a coma, and with double pneumonia, and they thought he was going south. Tim and Bet drove back down from Northampton, the first leg of their getaway, to check on him, instead of going north to Vermont. It seemed he was holding steady though, so they went on as planned. They'll be coming back just a few hours early tomorrow, so I won't have to come here after rehearsal to feed the beasts.
The amount of money I thought I counted in the envelope they left me was, in fact, twice that -- it's one of those mind farts where you think four twenties equals forty dollars -- and I told Tim that was too much. He insisted I keep it, and take the check for the band CD he wanted to buy. I feel like I want to organize their closets or something. I'm in a Buddhist household, working on my music and reading last winter's 50th anniversary Tricycle magazine, and thinking that in spite of the inconvenience of hardly any sleep, and being nipped in the stomach at five in the morning, I've gotten much out of this venture. Our group rehearsal tomorrow has just been transformed into an individual work day, except for one conference call with our publicist, so I'll be able to self-direct in the afternoon. I hope the rain has ended by then; I want to ride.
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Well, I got five hours of sleep total last night, which was an improvement. No doggie joy rage this morning. After feeding them at 5:15 I decided to just stay up. There's a mulberry tree out back and I spent a little time under its boughs, dodging a bit of poison ivy to fill a container with its burgeoning fruit. They're the best I've had in years. Well, they're the only ones I've had in years, except for some from an ancient tree in Maryland which weren't very good. Have you ever had them? The pits are soft, so there's none of that blackberry tussle, trying not to impact the teeth with little stones. And sweet, even before they're completely colored. I recommend eating in handfuls.
My shoes and socks are damp now, so I've put them on the windowsill to dry before I leave later this morning.
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Rose got a belly button ring. She went back to her tattoo place, with her friend Arlene who is everyone's dental hygienist. Arlene got her first tattoo, a little butterfly on her belly.
My sister shook her head quietly and said, "Who would have thought I'd ever being doing things like this to my body?" I may not have mentioned this, but Rose has four tattoos now -- a big cascade of morning glories on each shoulder, one with a butterfly and one with a hummingbird, and then a frog on each ankle. They're colorful and pretty, and I'm no longer surprised when I see them.
My mother was appalled when, as young teenagers, we wanted to get our ears pierced. It just wasn't done then. Can you imagine? Then, even when other body piercings became popular, I thought it was just too much. My mom finally got her ears pierced when she was 50. Now I look at Rose with a belly button ring and all this body art and go, "Oh. Cool. I wonder what I should get for a tattoo?"
I'm trying to think of the most permanent icon in my life. It hasn't come to me yet.
I think I'll try to take a nap, and then I can upload this later.
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Tuesday, home.
Cool, breezy. I didn't ride; I was far too exhausted. I took a nap instead, and our conference call was delayed so it'll be happening any minute. I downloaded pictures from my camera finally, and there were a couple of distant ones of Will which I took last week at a local gig he played backing up someone. He makes a funny face when he plays. I also had shots and a couple of movies from a "personal date" I took last week. I took myself to Mystic Seaport and to Misquamicut Beach in Rhode Island, and to Watch Hill where there is a lovely carousel. It was a great day which I needed to take for myself. There was a "Sea Dogs" exhibit at the Seaport, about the history of dogs going to sea, mostly during wartime. There were many paintings and etchings on the subject and one sign in particular caught my attention. I hope you like it. :)
