Late-Breaking Mews

I may be the slowest scooper on the parade route, but I would really like to think that if there was a strange cat holed up inside my sofa, I'd be able to figure it out. I'd like to think that if my sofa were mewing, and if I had just purchased the sofa used, and if the mewing began on the day I brought the sofa home, I'd be able to connect some dots. If I were not able to put it all together, I doubt that my first reaction, upon sitting down on the sofa and feeling something move beneath me, would be to pick up the sofa and look. Not unless I could do it from up on the ceiling fan.

A Miss Vickie Mendenhall, of Spokane, however, had lived with a yowling davenport for quite a few days before her boyfriend discovered the cat by sitting on it. Perhaps they were distracted. Perhaps the TV was too loud. "It sounds like there's a zebra in the garage," Miss Mendenhall might say. "That Simon Cowell is a tool," the boyfriend would respond, and that would be all there was to that, until someone had to back out the Cherokee.

In reality, though, I might not have been any quicker on the uptake. A lot of times when I hear something, it's just safer all around to assume that no one else can hear it. Recently I began to notice that there was a mild little eep! sound every so often when I was sitting at the computer. Dave heard it too, although even we don't consider that a lock on reality. It seemed quite random and was so quiet, like a distant mouse at a surprise party, that we were never able to triangulate it. Out of nowhere would come another eep! and we'd both point to each other, unable to agree on a source. I eventually discovered that it came hourly, at nineteen minutes after. Then I heard it while I was in a whole other room. I suspected my watch itself, and quarantined it upstairs, to no avail. Eep! No matter where we were, at nineteen after the hour we heard a little eep! coming from somewhere nearby.

When it eeped shortly before people were coming for dinner, I got the brilliant idea of setting an alarm for 59 minutes and enlisting the whole crew to listen up. I forgot to tell them about it, though, and when the buzzer sounded, I suddenly jumped up and screamed at everybody. "Mikey! Stand by the basement door! Susan! Over here by the oven! Andrea! Next to the computer! Go, go, go! Be very quiet and listen!" They all ran to their places, one wondering if he should pick up a weapon, one wondering if she should summon a medical professional. And we found it. Everyone was pointing in the same direction, like it was the grassy knoll. The oven was eeping. We have no idea why.

It's just another little reminder of the passage of time, and puts me in mind a bit of those moments of existential dread you sometimes get in the middle of the night. Those were a lot scarier when I was younger; it would feel like a pellet of ice hitting my heart, when suddenly, out of nowhere, I would recognize my own death as an actual event in my own actual future. It was terrifying. Those moments have come up periodically throughout my life (eep!) but over the years I've paid less attention to them. Oh crap, I'm going to die, alert the press; boo hoo; now, don't forget to throw some compost on the strawberry patch. I'm not liable to do anything about the oven, either.

Pimp My Platform

Here's how I thought the writing business should play out: I would go sit in a tower and write a really cool book. I would polish it up and present it in a form that required no editing, and pass it briefly under the nose of an agent or publisher, who would detect the scent of genius and promptly fling out thousands of copies to a waiting world.

I didn't actually write much of anything for about 52 years, but I did have a tower, so I had a good start. Then my friend Dave Gerritsen gave me some sort of choice--I believe one of the options was "get off the pot"--and I started writing some stuff down. It went well. I got a little something published, I won a couple little contests, and then I revised my plan. I had gotten some free publicity as a result of winning the contests, and so I thought I'd just sit in the front room, in literary heat, and whack at the agents and publishers with a broom as they crowded around the front porch; I'd let one or two with impeccable bloodlines stay. Meanwhile, I'd write a book.

The book was coming right along, but the front porch was kind of quiet. So I joined a writers' community and went to a meetin'. The preacher at the meetin' house soberly informed us that we needed to develop a Writer's Platform. My platform is pretty well developed, I've always thought, although it's nothing that couldn't be handled with stretchier pants. But I had misunderstood. In order to get a book contract, we needed to prove to a publisher that we could personally sell books, because they weren't about to be responsible for that. Heavens no. And the way to do that was not just to write a good book; certainly not. We needed to read in the town square, get a column in the paper, give commentaries on the radio, advertise on bus benches, wear spangly outfits and hire a bugler. Really, the writing was secondary.

So with great sadness and trepidation, I decided to start a blog. I didn't want to. What if I had only twelve ideas in my whole head, and after I had sent them out for free, there would be nothing left? Well. It turned out that I can go on and on about virtually any little thing. I had no idea. My husband Dave knew, and has made his peace with that over the years, but I didn't. It turned out to be fun. It's like a big paperweight for flyaway thoughts. All those odd little ideas that go traipsing in and out of my brain (there being, literally, nothing to stop them) now get pinned down in one place.

The book I'm writing is tentatively titled Miss Delivery: A Substantially True Postal Memoir. It's in the polishing stages. If you want to see it all published and everything, here's all you have to do: tell ten of your friends to read Murrmurrs. Tell them to tell ten of their friends. Within three or four weeks, we should have most of the planet on board unless some of you have duplicate friends--try not to do that. And don't break the chain or I'll have bad luck. Okay, pop along now--you should be able to do this before breakfast.

Incidentally: the blog posts that seem to engender the most spirited commentary are the ones about poop. I have written about it several times (raccoon poop, possum poop, lizard poop). Clearly, it speaks to something deep inside us all.

Wade Bogs

My niece Elizabeth and I were ready to set the world of amphibian egg mass monitoring on fire. It's a small world, but we're a small flame. We are among eighty or so volunteers checking on the health of local wetlands by locating and recording frog and salamander egg masses. We got our personal swamp assignment from the Big Frog Egg Boss, Jean Lea, and we were rubbered up and ready to wade. Hoo-yah! Team Brewster was on the march. We were familiar with the plan: wade your bog in a straightforward, methodical grid, taking care not to stomp the eggs or stir the murk, and flag all egg masses found. We were pumped. Jean Lea met us out at our site and waved in the general direction of what appeared to be, at most, a damp spot. "It doesn't look that big," I noted, to which she replied: "Well, it's deceptive."

An hour later I was up to my nipples in deceptive. Admittedly, this doesn't take as much water as it did ten years ago, but still. It was nearly impossible to wade the site methodically. Where we had envisioned a nice square Colorado of water, we got New Jersey. The margins were thick with willows and nearly impenetrable. We peered in as far as we could, but saw nothing. In the more open water, we were quickly within an inch of flooding our chest waders. We had at it from numerous angles, crawling through a barbed-wire fence and whacking through blackberry vines, and everywhere it seemed to call for a kayak or at least much taller amphibian egg mass monitors. I found myself fantasizing about the sites that had been assigned to other monitors. They looked like football fields; in my most despairing moments, they even came with yard markers to make the grid-walking easy as pie. Had we been sent on a snipe hunt? Was Jean Lea trying to drown us? Had she been informed that we had no progeny, and that once Team Brewster was gone, the world would be rid of us?

Worse, we had seen no egg masses at all. It was possible that they had not yet been laid, but we couldn't rule out that we were just the worst amphibian egg mass monitors ever. Self-doubt reigned. And then we saw them. Four massive blobs of red-legged frog egg jelly, green with algae and speckled with future tadpoles like an illustration of the meaning of life. Could anything be jollier?

The Northern Red-Legged Frog lays her eggs with the help of her smaller mate, who, according to the froggy manual, grasps her about the waist and squeezes. This in itself is romantic, because although the frogs are undeniably beautiful, they really don't have waists, so much, or not by our standards. But they might like to think they do. Part of romance involves shading the truth a little. It's sort of like when Dave and I were in the Louvre and he observed that the Venus de Milo's rear end reminds him of mine. This doesn't have much to do with the frogs, but I like to work it in whenever I can, and this post seemed like as good a place as any.

To be continued.
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Addendum: In an earlier post, I hinted broadly that it would be swell if we got official Amphibian Egg Mass Monitor badges. And my buddy Mary Ann Dabritz, an artist and unthwartable spirit, apparently agreed and promptly stepped up with this solid bronze beauty, which can be viewed along with a host of other amphibian art, and frankly, almost anything else a body could want at www.castofcharacters.com; there's a link in the left margin, under "Mary Ann's Astonishing Animalware."

On The Freedom Trial

The religious police in Saudi Arabia have their hands full trying to make sure the sexes are kept apart. A couple of them recently broke their own rules by ducking into a female-only establishment to haul a miscreant out by her hair. And mistakes have been made, as when a man who was dropping off his wife had the crap beaten out of him by the police, allegedly for consorting with a woman he wasn't married to. But anybody could have made that mistake; the wife, dressed head to toe in a black abaya, did indeed look like another woman. Any other woman, actually.

So it's only natural that an officer of the law is bound to goof up from time to time, and it's no different here. That's why I was closely following the trial involving my friend Freedom Child, who was accusing the police of bad form (at least) when they hauled her off to jail six years ago. Not that I'm not grateful to the cops for getting her off the street, if only for a few hours. I've known Freedom for a few years. She is a dangerous and terrifying person. If you're a head of broccoli.

Actually, I'm still a little unclear why she was the object of their attentions in the first place, unless they were just on a routine middle-aged-hippie troll and hadn't bagged their limit. She had just gotten off public transportation at night and hopped on her bike for the three-block trip home, neglecting to turn on her light, and when the unmarked car sidled up beside and followed her, she got off and walked it on the sidewalk. She was a harmless fifty-one-year-old woman, walking a bicycle decorated with streamers and a giant butterfly, and while none of this would have vibrated my antennae, that is because I am not a highly trained police officer.

Still, other than the half-block trip without a bike light, they didn't have too much to go on, I wouldn't think. Not until they continued to creep alongside her without identifying themselves, asked her repeatedly what she was up to, got out of the car, followed her up to her own porch and poked at her until she hollered and pulled away, and bingo--there you have it--resisting arrest. They insist they didn't pull her hair; they just gave it a little tug. If anything, they just grabbed her hair, and it was Freedom who did the pulling. And they only did that so as not to break her arm, which (they testified) looked thin. If Freedom got out of her bike-light infraction without any broken bones, that's evidence of police restraint right there, I'd say. As far as hauling her downtown in handcuffs goes, well, as the chief of police points out, they like to bring people in who have no mug shot or fingerprints (see "harmless," above) so they can get a mug shot and fingerprints. For the record. Just in case. Then they sent her out into the night, about when the bars let out, assuming she could figure out how to get home in one piece.

I ride my bike at night frequently, and I always have a light on. Sometimes I get a little poky about replacing the battery, though, and my lights get a little dim. Maybe for that they could give me a little shove or a dope-slap or something and just drive me halfway to the station before they drop me off in the middle of the night.

But for sure I've never been booked or fingerprinted, so they're going to want to take care of that right away. The police can come over tonight if they wish; I won't be doing anything. That's probable cause to bring me in right there.

Checking In With Grandma

I picked up some spectacles the other day. Kaiser mentioned I had $150 credit towards a new pair of glasses, so I thought I'd get some, and maybe have enough cash left over to get me some sort of random Procedure. I haven't bought glasses for a while. $150 doesn't even get halfway around your face.

I've worn contact lenses since I was a teenager. In the sixties, getting used to contacts was an ordeal of the first order. They were thick and rigid and putting them in was like dipping little hubcaps in hot sauce and stabbing them onto your eyeballs. An hour is about all you could stand of that, and you were expected to bump that up by fifteen-minute increments every day until you either went blind or nuts or got used to them. It was painful, but pain was no match for teenage vanity. The first time one of the hubcaps slid off my cornea and began to travel across my eye, I flew into a panic. Would it go all the way around and slice off the string that held my eyeball in? Ultimately, I got used to them, although if an eyelash wedged in underneath it could cause me to fall off the sidewalk, weeping.

Over the years the product became lighter and thinner and gas-permeable and altogether more bearable. I never went over to the soft variety. One day at a softball game, a towering fly came to me in right field. I yelled "I got it I got it I got it" and deftly snagged the ball with my eye socket. That got the runner to third and me to the emergency room, where the immediate task was retrieving my contact lens before my eye swelled shut so tight they'd have to send in a team of spelunkers. Do you know that the average emergency medical cabinet contains tiny little toilet plungers for just that purpose? The doctor pries your lids open and takes the little plunger and goes doink and there's your lens.

So there have always been difficulties with the contacts, but it's a pretty good system overall. After you turn forty, something needs to be done about the close-in vision, so instead of bifocals, they give you one lens for distance vision and one for reading. Your eyes and brain duke it out and finally work something out amongst themselves. But then after another fifteen years or so, you discover you're kind of an old lady and things dry up, including your eyeballs. Now the contacts are starting to get a little cranky. It's nothing like the hubcap debacle, but towards the end of the day they begin to feel a little like Ritz Bits, salty side down. This is when I decided it might be prudent to get a spare set of $150 glasses, maybe just for the evenings, and three hundred additional bucks later, I have some. They're tiny and light, with progressive trifocals, and they work amazingly well. I can see everything very clearly as long as I'm peering out of the correct part of the glasses, and soon I hope to have mapped out which parts work where. I haven't put my contacts back in, to my surprise, and may have just become a four-eyes again, after forty years.

It's not that I don't think I look dorky, but maybe I just don't care as much. I did take a quick glance in the mirror. That's where Grandma lives. I don't check in with her often, but maybe I'll start. She was a sweet-faced old lady.

A Too Smart Car

My car got a recall notice the other day. There's something screwy with the seat belts. There's some little doo-dad in there that might cause the car to burst into flames in a front-end collision, is all. The possibility of getting into a wreck is vivid enough without tossing a fiery explosion into the scenario, so I took it in for the free fix.

This is my favorite of the four cars I've owned, even though the second one was a snazzy silver sports car. I drove that one around doing 50 on the highway. It went from zero to 60 in, well, at least twelve years, and we'll never really know. In retrospect, it probably wasn't a good match for my personality. This one, though, is off-the-charts adorable. It looks like a little red jellybean. There's not much to it; no power anything; even the windows are roll-downs, but I can reach them all from the driver's seat without lifting off the left cheek. Considered one way, it gets fabulous gas mileage--about two weeks to the gallon. But on the occasions I do drive, I find myself a bit disappointed in the mileage. It shouldn't take any more fuel than you'd need to power a honeybee. But the last time out, it didn't even crest 30 mpg. I suspect the car's brain is involved.

My last car, a thoroughly ordinary sedan, was the first car I owned that had a brain. And it was Abbie Normal. It was prone to automotive grand mal seizures at unpredictable moments. In between convulsions it was quite reliable. But intermittent reliability is, concept-wise, like occasional irregularity. It took two brain transplants to shape it up, and then an old guy in a station-wagon plowed into it, and later I drove it into a massive crater, and later yet the mechanic confiscated it so I wouldn't be driving it when the rear axle fell off. He wouldn't give it back. He's ethical. Then I got my sweet little jellybean.

The salesman told me to drive smoothly and consistently for the first thousand miles, after which point the car's brain would figure out some things about me and adjust itself accordingly, by magic. I should have realized then and there I'd be in trouble because when my possessions are allowed to have brains, then they are capable of standing in judgment of me, and I never come out good. I fear that's what happened this time too. I had gone about 1500 miles before someone noticed that I'd been driving in third gear the whole time. There are a lot of options on the gear shift, but one of them is "3-D." That's where I always put it. I guess I thought everything would look flat until I shifted there. In reality there are two options in that slot: third on the left and drive on the right, and I had been snugging it into third. So after a thousand miles my car learned something about me all right, and it wasn't flattering. Sure gets good mileage parked, though.

To Form A More Fabulous Union

I've had occasion to revisit my earlier quandary about the raccoons and the possums. We used to have possums, now we have raccoons. I have a new theory as to why. Possibly the raccoons evicted the possums from the yard until they agree to quit hanging by the tail. Raccoons couldn't hang from their tails if they tried, but the very idea of it makes them all squirmy. From the raccoons' point of view, it simply can't be borne.

I'm basing this hypothesis on the news today that Vermont is all in an uproar again over gay marriage. They've had legal civil unions there for nine years, and evidently a whole lot of Vermonters haven't gotten used to it. Maybe they don't get out much. This week the state is considering a bill that would allow same-sex marriage. Protesters are converging on the Capitol with signs reading "Marriage--A Mother And Father For Every Child." When Dave and I got married, we were unaware that procreation was required. It isn't something we'd had in mind. At first, people asked us when we were going to have children. That line of inquiry started to peter out when we told them we'd been to a genetic counselor and found out that there was just too much risk the child would end up something like us. And no one asked us anymore after Dave started explaining that you couldn't make babies with spit. Aaany-hoo.

I guess we'll have to forgo travel to Vermont in case they snatch back our marriage license for lack of spawn. I've never really understood all this uproar. It's truly baffling. Somehow I get the idea that folks think same-sex marriages are so attractive that their children will be vacuumed right up into one, emerging with good taste and a lively sense of humor, and then where will we be? But it isn't catching. (It's a gift.) In the article, it is explained that opponents of same-sex marriage believe it will "render men and women interchangeable." Well, that clears it up. It's a real concern. Right there in Vermont, a young fellow was recently fined for shooting a doe illegally. He went to a considerable amount of trouble to drill and fasten a rack of antlers to it with lag bolts and epoxy, and tried to pass it off as a buck. So you can see people aren't making this stuff up; they see it every day.

Still, it all makes me a little cranky. I'm assuming that all the people who feel this way will eventually wander to the ends of the earth and fall off, and the rest of us will have our nicely spinning planet to ourselves. As to the possums, as far as I'm concerned, they can come back any time. I don't care how they're hanging.