Monday, August 23, 2010

Eddie Vedder hit the nail on the head

Monday, August 23, 2010

Right up front, I will advise that this week’s column is a bit of a stray from my regular scrape of words on skunks, spiders, dogs, and chocolate.

This is where you can jump off if you like, and return next week for the usual script that will include my version of a recent trip I took to the big city.

But at this moment I am on the “Eat, Pray, Love” train and in my foreseeable future, I will not be getting off.

After all, Elizabeth Gilbert did the write the book just for me. I understand that some people would rather stick a fork in their eyeball than read it, and that’s okay too.

I’m on my second go ‘round of the paperback, crossing over at “Attraversiamo” on page 331 right back upon the Introduction in one fluid sweep—and this time armed with a highlighter to mark all the passages that were light bulb moments. Truth be told, I’ve also been to see the movie three times within a week, and I suspect I just might go back again.

And if I could afford it, I would buy the book for every woman I know who has an open mind—and for one man in particular who would definitely benefit from the read, given his current trajectory.

Rarely do I become so infatuated with a book—or a movie for that matter.

The last time I was in movie “gaga” was when “Titanic” hit the screen in 1997. I think I saw it four times. Before that, it was “The Lion King” in 1994. It’s the only movie I’ve ever been to in the ‘Cine5’ theatre where, on first viewing, the audience stood up, clapped, and cheered at the end.

So here I am in unchartered waters where my ship hit an iceberg and the circle of married life cracked and blew my heart wide open.

I’d bought the book when it was first published over three years ago, but put it on a shelf and never picked it up again until a month and a half ago when I was about to lose myself to the flies of sadness that were constantly swirling around in my mind.

There was a day when I would have rather eaten live tarantulas than give way to this path of change, but as I am discovering every day since I’ve been on the “Eat, Pray, Love” train, the road is one that rises ever so gently to meet me when I give the Universe a chance to show me what is possible.

"You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That's the only thing you should be trying to control."

Ms Gilbert’s philosophies have opened my eyes and my soul to hope, and at the very least have helped save me from wallowing endlessly in a pity party that begins and ends with the sentence, “I can not imagine my life without you in it.”

This is not to say for a minute that I don’t still have a broken heart. I do. But now I can live with it.

I am learning to give that “hurt and pinch” some light and love and then drop it. It’s not easy, and on occasion I still go for a drive in my truck and cry big crocodile tears, or mow my lawn and pretend my soon-to-be ex-spouse is every blade of grass.

But no longer am I willing to let those emotions be the energy vampires in my day-to-day world. Life is too short and I love myself too much to lose another day’s grace in a dark room full of self-loathing.

And I say “Thank You” out loud a lot. I’m not even sure to whom or to what I am saying it, but I say it anyway and especially when the moment is seemingly about to make me a victim of own optimism.

I have discovered that it is my word.

Robert Frost used three to sum up everything he learned about life and he’s right. “Life goes on.”

My future is paved with better days.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Ice cream doesn't fix everything

Monday, August 16, 2010

Skunk smell on dog.

Ice cream doesn’t fix that. Nothing really fixes that indescribable stench, including the hydrogen peroxide/dish soap/baking soda concoction I found on Google.

Of course in my wisdom I added vinegar. I’d heard what a dishful of the liquid could do to absorb household cooking odors.

I learned very quickly—at the moment my dog’s fur puffed out like an erupting volcano on four legs—that the chemical reaction between vinegar and baking soda is best left to the high school science lab.

I’m convinced, after this latest spray park episode in my neck of the woods, that my dogs are cousins of the deer family. Neither genus remembers nor passes down to their young, the traumatic events that involve skunks or traffic.

I hardly ever see the skunk. The standard is that it just lifts its tail from deep in the long grass of the field where the dogs are playing and BAM!

But of course, my neck of the woods is about as far from the norm as one can get.

The latest prequel consisted of me minding my own business on the lawn tractor, catching a whiff of skunk, rolling my eyes, cursing the umpteenth encounter of the summer and then moving on to the uncut portion of grass.

The latest prequel also consisted of me minding my own business on the lawn tractor, coming ‘round for a second cut, and seeing the canine stupors literally in a tug-of-war with the skunk, which was gnashing, spraying, and quite rightly and most seriously furious.

But as I have alluded to in other chicken scratch columns, the rodents of this world are no matches for Dot. She of course, was at least smart enough to have picked the skunk’s head in battle. Cash was headlong at the tail end of the fight and hence became my science project on four legs.

And then there’s the rat story. Ice cream didn’t fix that either, but it did cross my mind to use it as bait.

Instead I turned once again to Google, and typed, “rat poop” and “weasel poop” into the Images link. Clearly the little black droppings on the laptop screen looked exactly like the gazillion count I found in a corner of an old horse stall in the barn. I had a rat problem.

Time for the big guns.

I called the Lone Ranger, known to have one of everything, including a live trap. But by the next morning after we set the catch, I was convinced I not only had a rat, but a smart rat.

In what I took as a sort of middle finger gesture—it had climbed on top of the live trap and pooped all over it instead of venturing inside for the juicy piece of pork rind left for the little devil.

Time for the bigger guns.

I made a beeline straight for the hardware store and stocked up on little green squares of rat poison and placed them strategically on the snack table of my enemy.

Just then, while down on my knees and in full vulnerability of “Willard” and his sociopathic brood of rodents, a small fast thing whirred past my peripheral vision. I froze.

A chipmunk? Was that a white flag he was carrying?

I hadn’t even considered googling “chipmunk poop,” and as it turned out the little striped sassafras was the culprit all along.

Of course it’s a given that I now cater to “Elvis” with a daily supply of unshelled, unsalted peanuts.

And when it started to rain a few days ago all I could think about was how the wet weather would thankfully put a damper on the wood tick population in my neck of the woods.

In a minute of panic that rivaled the shower scene from the movie “Psycho,” I recently fought with a wood tick that was stuck to the arch of my foot. I didn’t have my contact lenses in and thought it was sock fuzz until when I tried to flick it off, it got stuck to my index finger. I freaked out and tried to boil it off with the showerhead before watching it slide down the drain. I then imagined it clinging to the side of the drainpipe until the middle of the night, when it would crawl back up the drain hole and be waiting for me on the toilet seat in the morning.

It’s amazing how scared I get of something so small—just like thong underwear. Scary. Very, very scary.

Ice cream doesn’t fix that picture either, but a big bowl of it sure would taste good right about now.

Monday, August 2, 2010

Doubt if you must, but trust me on the sunscreen

Monday, August 2, 2010

Eating a third, frozen chocolate chip cookie from a zip lock baggie in the freezer did not help me decide what to write about this week. But it did convince me that my diet vows are, at times, pointless drivel—particularly the one I made last night in front of my daughter when I proclaimed that I would not allow anything unhealthy to pass over my lips during the next seven days.

Obviously that diet declaration fell out of my mouth and onto the floor, where it scurried under the bed to hide among the dust bunnies—and with it my baker’s logic that if I put cookies in the freezer, I would be deterred from eating any.

Who was I kidding? They taste better frozen.

Come to think of it, I put the blame for my latest across-the-board junk food wagon ride squarely at the feet of the two potato chip and chocolate bar addicts whom I took camping with me this past weekend.

Both of them carried around a beach bag full of forbidden snack food at all times, with goodies often fanned out in front of them like a dealer’s hand in a game of Blackjack.

Before I knew it I’d gone from a lettuce and carrot salad menu on Friday afternoon to an hourly intake of Tootsie rolls, salsa-flavored potato chips, Hershey’s chocolate bars, and cinnamon buns by Saturday morning.

So as I sat here in front of the living room window on the holiday Monday in August, flexing my typing finger and watching my stomach inch its way outward and over the top of my jeans in protest of my latest foodie over-indulgence, an unknown dog of large and lanky measure appeared on the grassy knoll at the edge of my property line I share with my new neighbors. It sniffed about and promptly peed upon my blue spruce seedling.

My flat stare expression pressed up against the glass and my rapping knuckles went unnoticed except to the four little birds merrymaking in the grass, that I startled and sent in a flurry straight for me.

I ducked as the birds hit the window. Fortunately for my yet-to-be- allotted window budget and the birds, my fine-feathered friends flew off unscathed, save a few less downy feathers.

One would think I had just shouted ““SQUIRREL!!”

Most of the time the noun is my roll call to the dogs to help drive said rodent up a tree when it’s been spotted stealing sunflower seeds from the birdfeeder.

It also works as a “cat-a-lyst” when “Ozzie” the feline is lining up his stealth move against the lone finch I’m trying to save from his clawed grip.

The sudden commotion sent my own canine capers, which were sleeping soundly in the kitchen, into a barking frenzy that reached the ears of the four-legged scoundrel and sent it high-tailing back across the county line.

But I digress.

There I was standing at the living room window, lamenting no storyline for my column, overdone by too many cookies, my hair looking like the “Wrath of Kahn” and with enough static in it to wipe out a radio station, as I smeared sunscreen all over my face and neck before I headed outside to cut the grass with Big John.

Then the telephone rang. On the other end was a potential employer seeking me for a job interview in the next 30 minutes.

Was it some kind of weird loyalty speed test?

Regardless, I jumped at the opportunity to impress and made a mad dash for the bedroom and the one set of dress pants I owned.

I nearly took my own breath away when I looked in the mirror at my emerging “Don King” hairdo, and the creases around my eyes and that of my chicken neck streaked with white sunscreen residue.

And for the first time in nearly 14 weeks I got down on my knees and thanked the floor that I didn’t have a husband walking through the door right then farming for a kiss.

The budding single life does have its perks.