Afternoon Sunshine

 Dilly Dog is six years old, which makes her middle-aged.  She loves to nap in a sunny spot on the couch every afternoon.  

Three weeks after her annual visit to the vet in early September, we noticed that the fur on her tail and hindquarters was getting sparse. So back to the vet we went. Of course I read everything beforehand that I could find online about fur loss in dogs. I was afraid the vet would blame food allergies and that we'd be in for a long period of trial and error.  Instead, the vet immediately ordered a pricy blood test. Verdict: low thyroid!  You would expect to get such a diagnosis if you owned an expensive dog with a persnickety pedigree. But surely not with a sturdy mutt of uncertain parentage such as Dilly. We paid an Amish farmer $20 for her. He owned her mother, but said he had no idea who her daddy was. 

Fortunately low thyroid is easy to treat and not too expensive. She takes a pill twice a day.  Her tail still looks rat-like, and her fur loss is now apparent all over her body. She might have been suffering from low thyroid for some months before we first noticed the problem. It may take awhile for her fur to grow back. 

Another Puzzle

 

A Poem: Sled Ride

I wrote this poem about a childhood memory nearly10 years ago. Mother's second husband-to-be lived on a street parallel to our own, separated by Shady Brook Park. On snowy days Mother would often pull my sister and me through the park on a sled. One day we just happened to meet up with a man we didn't know.

Two tiny girls

capped and mittened,

snug on a baby's sled,

Mother's boots squeaking

in the crisp, new snow 

as she pulled us along, 

down the hill

and through the park, 

across the creaky wooden bridge.

The stream trickled slowly

as water stood freezing in the pond.

Bare branches rattled in the ice-blue sky,

clutching at winter as if to hold it close.

Spring was stirring in our mother's frozen heart.

Who was this man we didn't know?

Her smile was warm as April,

her laughter, dazzling as crystals.

Who was this man out walking in the snow?

 

Pearl and Oliver, Part 2 of 2

 Oliver and Pearl in 1943, holding my sister, Barbara

That might be my grandfather's DeSoto coupe in the background. He always called this particular car "my machine." As in, "Where did I park my machine?" 

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Then one night, sitting on the edge of the bed before his shift began, he angrily threw his blackjack against the wall. Police work apparently didn't suit him either. Next, he opened a pool room. Sometime around World War II, he became the manager of the local Eagles Club.  Among his jobs was tinkering with the slot machines to adjust their payout. The coins would get dumped out on a big oaken table before the tinkering began. Any nickels or dimes that rolled onto the floor were mine. I looked forward the tinkering sessions. I also eagerly anticipated visits from the "otter" (auditor) until I found out he was just an ordinary man. 

Kids weren't allowed to watch the floor shows at the Eagles Club, with the exception of the Christmas show.  As manager, Grampy also had to hire performers through a booking agent in Erie, PA.  I was seven years old and living with my grandparents when I finally got to see a show. There I was in the Big Room, sitting at a table with Grammy, drinking Nehi orange pop and watching a blond tap dancer in a brief, spangly costume. Everything was fine until she tap-danced over to Grampy, plopped herself down on his lap, wrapped her arms around him and planted a big "show-biz" kiss on his forehead.  Everyone else laughed and applauded. I burst into tears. I was outraged. How dare she?

Why was I living with my grandparents?  When I was two, my sister, Barbara, was born, but our parents' marriage was already in trouble.  Often, I would stay with Pearl and Oliver while Mother and Barbara went to White haven, my maternal grandparents' farm. It so happened I was with Pearl and Oliver at the Eagles Club when I caught spinal meningitis at age 3.  The other case in town was a taxi driver, who'd also been at the club. He died. I was in a coma for several days and lost the hearing in my right ear.

Over the next few years, until our parents' divorce, Barbara and I spent part of our time at our parents' house and part of our time at our grandparents' houses. Both of us might be together at the farm, but often I would be by myself at Pearl and Oliver's. By the time I was five, I probably began spending more and more time with them, so that someone could drive me to Mrs. Smith's house for kindergarten. After the divorce in 1947, Mother and Barbara took a train to Miami, FL, where Mother married Charles. I moved in with Pearl and Oliver and lived full time with them until my dad's remarriage in 1949.

Pearl and Oliver, Part 1 of 2

 This is a photo of my paternal grandparents taken the Christmas of 1956 at my dad's and stepmother's new house.  Grandmother would have turned 64 in January, 1957, and Grandfather, 67, in February. 

Pearl Miller and Oliver Rice grew up on neighboring farms in Crider's Corners in Cranberry Township, PA. Oliver was the youngest of nine or ten children. Pearl was the oldest of three. She had a sister, Ruth, and a brother, Jay. Pearl and Oliver left school after 8th grade.  Pearl worked by cleaning, cooking, and caring for children in the neighborhood.  She and Oliver were married on November 2nd, probably in 1911. Oliver chose the date to coincide with the opening of deer season. Pearl was 18 years old. 

After Kenneth (my dad) was born in Ambridge, PA in January 1913, Pearl went back home to her parents (14 miles away). Oliver came to bring her back. She said she didn't want a houseful of children.  Oliver convinced her to return. My Uncle Dale was born in May, 1914.  There were no more children after that. My maternal grandmother told me it was much easier to get an abortion back in those days, if you knew which local doctor to approach. 

Pearl and Oliver were determined that both boys would go to college. Pearl claimed that Kenneth always wanted to be a lawyer and that Dale always wanted to be a doctor. Dale made "candy pills" as a little boy, she said. However, when the boys grew up, both claimed they'd had other ideas.  Kenneth said he'd always wanted to be a businessman. His high school year book characterized him as "a wee business man." During a holiday dinner at Pearl and Oliver's house, I clearly remember Dale saying he had always wanted to be a teacher. 

The young family settled in Meadville, PA, a small town 90 miles north of Ambridge. Oliver tried running a grocery store, a small "Red and White." He lost money until he began making a little during his going-out-of-business sale, but by then it was too late. He tried life as a fireman, but he was a small man who had trouble managing the fire hose. He tried life as a police man. His happiest moment came during one cold night during Prohibition. Patrolling West Street, where the Blacks lived at the time, he entered an abandoned house through a jimmied window to get warm. Inside he found bottles of bootleg liquor, which he quietly took home. 

Driving with Carrots

The local supermarket, where someone "hand picks" the items in our order and someone else delivers it to our door, has claimed for three weeks now to be out of 2-pound bags of fresh carrots. Let me say right here I am grateful for this service. However. Instead of normal carrots, they've provided what they think passes for an acceptable  substitute: a two-pound bag of baby carrots, peeled and cut into egg shapes.  To me, these "eggs" look like they've been laid by a sinister reptile. 

Now an 8-ounce bag of baby carrots is probably OK if you have school-age children. They're great for school lunches. But wait! At least around here, kids have not been eating in the school lunchroom for months. See, the trouble with a 2-pound bag of baby carrots for a couple of old folks is they start changing (and not for the better) after a day or two. I'm talking about the carrots. A whitish "skin" blooms on the surface and they start tasting weird.  (It could be my sense of taste is off because of a medicine I take.). I was very unhappy when a second bag of baby carrots showed up the next week as a substitute for regular carrots.

We went to the family cabin in Knox County, OH two weeks ago. We carried all our food in coolers because of the corona virus. I thought maybe I'd cut up the carrots  for vegetable soup, but once I got to the cabin, I got lazy. My husband gamely chomped away on them day by day, but I wasn't having it. Came the day to go home and too many carrots were still hanging around. 

"Oh, just get rid of them! Toss them out for the rabbits."  

"Haven't seen any rabbits around here for years."  

"Well, maybe the chipmunks will like them. Or the raccoons."

Well, he didn't toss them all out because he knew Dilly Dog would immediately gobble all 20 of them up.

So here's what he did. He put them on the top of the Subaru. "They'll fall off on the way home," he said. We could hear them rolling around when we went up hills or around corners and we could see one or two fall off now and then. 

It was very discouraging to drive through rural Ohio one week before Election Day. For every Biden/Harris sign, there were twenty Trump/Pence signs.  It looked like 2016 all over again, back when the President was running against Hillary. We saw only one Confederate flag this year, so that was encouraging, but we also saw a sign that said "Pro God, Pro Life, Pro Gun", and that wasn't. 

We drove in to Washington, PA, just over the line from West Virginia. A billboard  invited us to "rent a machine gun" from Washington County Machine Guns. Well, that got our attention! When I got home, I looked the organization up on line and it turns out to belong to a company that provides individuals and groups with supervised access to the latest in military weaponry and vintage World War II weaponry on the company's shooting range.  Check out their amazing inventory of guns and rocket launchers on line. If you want to fire one of these babies, you have to be at least 16 years old and accompanied by a parent or guardian if you are 18 or under. 

We started our 9-hour trip with a dozen-plus carrots rolling around on the roof of the car. We reached Laurel, MD with two. They'd gotten stuck in wind deflector. 

The Hoarder, Part 4 of 4

On Tuesday, Beatrice and Bunny showed up again and undid most of the meager progress Milton had made.  Bunny retrieved the gilt mirror frame from the truck because she planned to enroll in an oil-painting class after the move to the condo. She'd put that frame to use someday. The twins' scope of "things we might use in the condo" widened to include treasures from every room in the house. The items they declared off-limits in order to "think about them some more" included:

• Bookshelves, still crammed with moldy books,
• a turntable
• a collection of 78s that "might be valuable someday",
• curtains that never got hung, still in their vinyl packets,
• Aunt Veronica's collection of Beanie Babies and her novelty salt-and pepper shaker sets, and
• 12 perfect place settings of their grandmother's ugly wedding china.

The truck had been hired until Wednesday and was still less than a quarter full. That afternoon, the cleaning crew found a desiccated feline skeleton in the basement, buried under an avalanche of old newspapers.  When she saw the pathetic remains, Martha began to cry. "That's Topsy!" she shrieked at Milton. "You told me you saw her climb the fence and run away. Liar!"  Martha swung at him ineffectually with a broken umbrella. As Milton backed away, Emily moved in to comfort Martha with a hug. "Don't touch me!" screamed Martha.

On Wednesday morning, Emily and Dr. Thimble commended Milton on his progress and announced that he was now "empowered" to finish the project on his own. The truck left at 4:00, with room to spare. The dumpster was collected at 4:30. The cleaning crew left in their van at 5:00.  Milton was alone, because Martha had gone to her sister's on Tuesday to grieve for Topsy. She told Milton that he "had finally done it" and that she might never come back. 

Milton savored the silence, surrounded by his old friends, his things. He found a forgotten bottle of beer in the emptied refrigerator.  He ordered a pizza. While he waited, he dragged his ratty old recliner close to the TV and lay back. He'd find the remote later, he told himself as he dozed off.

Life was good.