Wild Kingdom
The other day, my wife Robin brought a cat home from work. It had been wandering around outside her office and the minute people saw it, they started whispering “give it to Robin” because they knew she was a sucker. A few hours later, the cat was in our extra room with a litter box and a food and water dish, under quarantine to protect our other cats from possible cat diseases. The new cat stayed there for five days. Then I took her to the vet for testing.
“She doesn’t have FIV or feline leukemia,” I told Robin over the phone, “but the tests did uncover something else.”
“What?”
“She’s male.”
And that’s how, as of this moment, we have a new, pre-neutered tomcat running around our house and making himself at home. I didn’t have time to react because everything happened so quickly. This place, it’s a zoo. We’ve got four horses. The neighbors have chickens and sheep. We have a dog, Monty, who bites people in the crotch when he gets excited. We have two other cats, Liz and Gidget. And now we’ve got this new one.
Named Carl.
I suppose I would have been more surprised by Robin’s actions if my mom hadn’t once brought a cat home from vacation. If I didn’t think this kind of thing was the norm, always having heard stories about how when Mom was a kid, she had dogs and cats and hamsters and turtles and snakes. She had two ducks and six chickens that lived in her bedroom for some reason. In college, she had a cancer-ridden mouse named Fharquart. And as an aside, while all of this was going on, my grandmother once found a chipmunk trapped half in and half out of his hole. To ease the chipmunk’s entry, she slathered him with Crisco. True story.
So the animal thing goes way back. Our house has always been a haven, no matter where the house happens to be. It’s like there’s an underground network; the animals know where to go. Take this bird that made a nest beside our driveway. Robin discovered the nest while mowing the grass, when the bird began to screech and puff herself up. So that bit of grass didn’t get mowed, and for the next month or two, the bird would stand up and yell at me whenever I went out to get the mail.
“Don’t bitch at me,” I’d tell her. “You’re the fool who built a nest on the ground.”
One day, I was driving home from playing volleyball and my phone rang. The first thing Robin said was, “What do you know about baby birds?”
“Did the eggs by the driveway hatch?” That bird’s name was Heddy, by the way.
“No. Another bird. I don’t know what to feed it. What do you know about them?”
I told her, They die.
“They die?”
“It’s like the first law of rescuing baby birds. No matter what you do, they die.”
“Call your mother,” she said.
So I called my mom and told her that Robin had gotten into some sort of crackpot situation with a baby bird. I asked her, What do you know about baby birds?
“No matter what you do, they die.”
Driving along, I shrugged for nobody to see. “That’s what I told her.”
My mother, of course, rescued baby birds — little hairless things that made noise and tipped their triangular beaks straight up, making them look like gnomes with pointy hats. She said that she pulverized a worm and fed it to them with an eyedropper. Anyway, she added, by the next morning, they were dead.
I reported back to Robin. “My mom says the mother bird regurgitates bugs and worms and stuff the babies’ mouths.”
A moment of silence. “Well, I’m not doing that.”
By the time I got home, the bird was sitting in a box filled with hay and a plate of birdseed. He was larger than I’d expected — about the size of a feathery baseball. This upped his survival chances by a factor of ten or more. He would only eat the birdseed if Robin dropped one kernel at a time into his mouth. She had named him Reggie. He was this tight little brown ball with his chin to his chest, looking decidedly annoyed.
“He’s surly,” Robin explained.
She told me Reggie’s story, about how her mother had saved him from one of their barn cats. My mother-in-law then remembered the bird with the nest in our lawn and decided to try some matchmaking. She brought Reggie over and placed him on the ground near the nest. He sat perfectly still, in a tight surly ball, looking annoyed. Heddy stood from her nest and yelled at him until he was returned to his box.
“He seems more pissed-off than traumatized,” Robin said, dropping another piece of birdseed.
We kept Reggie overnight. The next day, we took him back to Robin’s mother so she could take him to someone she knew who rescues birds. The whole time we were driving, Reggie sat in a surly little ball and napped. He’d squalk at me if I hit a bump and woke him up. The way he did it, it was pretty obvious he was insulting me.
And now we’ve got this new cat, Carl. Robin also keeps pushing for another dog.
“We don’t need another dog,” I told her.
“Monty needs a friend.”
“One of my mom’s friends had a goat,” I told her. “She had to get rid of it because it kept standing on her car.”
Robin had a goat. It’s name was Goat. “They like to stand on things,” she agreed.
“You know what’s funny?” I asked. “Did you ever stop to think how weird it is that we have animals living in our house? I mean, everyone takes pets for granted. But if you really think about it, it’s pretty messed up that we have animals living with us. I mean, for real.”
“Yeah, I’ve never heard that insight before,” she said. She mocks me often because I tend to say the same things over and over again without realizing it.
“My mom had a chick that used to sleep on a doll bed,” I said. “She took a picture and sent it in to Ripley’s Believe It or Not, but they didn’t think a chicken on a little bed was too amazing.”
She hadn’t heard that story before, and the sheer oddity of it tricked her into quieting down. But as I sit here, Monty is biting me and there are three cats, Carl included, demanding my attention. And I wonder how long it will be until we get that second dog or fifth horse or even a goat of our own. But whatever we get — and I’m sticking to my guns about this — I’m not letting it stand on my car.
Pelee: It's Not Just a Funny-Sounding Word Anymore
Friday, my stepfather Todd and I are waiting in line to ride the Millennium Force roller coaster and the next Thursday, my wife Robin and I are flying over it in a terrifying little airplane. From above, I have two distinct impressions. One is that the new coaster dwarfs the Magnum, which only a few years ago was the tallest coaster in the world. The other is that if Cedar Point makes its money providing death thrills, then it should really look into buying this airplane we’re on.
This is the way to Pelee Island, and it’s never easy.
As we fly on, we see Lake Erie below, populated with boats close enough for us see on-deck shenanigans. There used to be two ferries to Pelee. One moved over to serve Pelee-bound Canadians and the other decided not to go to Pelee anymore. If you own a boat (or eight boats, as Todd does), you can take yourself to Pelee. If you don’t, you fly in these ten-seat coffins.
“At least if the engines quit, we don’t have far to fall,” Robin says.
This is the way to Pelee. It’s never easy, since the island is isolated in Canadian waters, but it’s worth it if Pelee is your type of place. WARNING: It is not a lot of people’s type of place. You get land and you get adjacent water, but the rest is pretty much do-it-yourself. We knew people who came to visit the island one afternoon as a day trip. They stepped off the ferry onto the dirt roads with nothingness all around and said, “Now what the hell are we supposed to do?”
The successful Pelee-goer will have perfected the fine art of doing nothing. Just above nothing is playing darts and cards, and spending hours upon hours reading. Don’t turn on the TV. You won’t get reception anyway.
Our hosts, Vince and Georgene, advise, “Pretend you’re on a 1930s farm.”
On a 1930s farm, you apparently shower with lake water. You apparently only flush when absolutely necessary. That’s right — you know what I’m talking about.
The first time we visited, we were sitting down for dinner when Vince said, “Get this. A bear walks into a bar. Bartender says, ‘What’ll ya have?’ And the bear says…”
And here, there was a dramatic silence.
“…’I'll have a beer,’” he continued. “And the bartender says, ‘Why the big paws?’”
If you aren’t chuckling right now, remember that “paws” is a homonym of “pause.” And if you’re still not chuckling, then I’m not inviting you over for cocktails because it means you won’t like my other favorite joke, either.
What’s brown and sticky?
Answer: A stick.
Vince and Georgene are in their seventies but act decades younger, like everyone else on Pelee. I’d say it’s something in the water, but we’re not usually supposed to drink what comes out of the tap. Or brush our teeth with it. Or use it for cooking or in coffee. Or allow it within six inches of exposed skin.
This visit, I asked Vince to tell the bear joke again. He didn’t remember having told it the first time.
Last week’s was our third visit. And I should explain: Vince and Georgene are not related to us. They’re the parents of my mom’s friend Kathy. Yet for some reason, they like to have many random people visit, and for our part, we’re all too happy to go as often as they’ll tolerate us. We try to increase this statistic by helping out. We wash the dishes. We take the garbage to the dump, which Vince calls “the mall” and from which he has procured some of his deck furniture. We bury organic garbage. We burn pretty much everything else. Then we go home and I throw everything into one can and it’s like a vacation.
Rule #1: When you drive down any of Pelee’s many dirt roads, it’s standard to honk and wave at passing cars. If you do not, everyone will know you’re either a day-tripper or an asshole. Try to drive slowly when passing bikes. They’re already ruining their chances of having children by riding on the washboard surface, so don’t make it worse by burying them in a dust plume.
And while we’re at it, please don’t expect your own private bedroom suite. When we’ve visited in the past, there have been up to twelve people in the small cottage. Plus two dogs.
Which leads to Rule #2: People come and go and sleep where there’s room, including on the floor. It’s a vagabond atmosphere. That’s the way we see it. You can also see it the way Georgene does, suggesting that we tell our friends, “I came to a bed and breakfast on Pelee, but they didn’t give me a bed and they didn’t give me breakfast.”
Prepare yourself for sporadic pointless competitions. Last year there was a kayak race, which was marred by controversy when a contestant who shall remain nameless grabbed and dragged more than one of his opponents backward. Several entrants capsized.
Rule #3: Look for unnecessary projects. This year, we helped shovel a bunch of dirt around randomly. One year, I’m told, a team of men with a tractor spent most of a day trying to move a boulder. My mother, who tells this story, reports being unclear as to why the boulder needed to move in the first place.
The cottage we visit is on Lorain Lane, so-called because most of the cottages along it are owned by people who live across the lake in Lorain, Ohio. So, they all know each other. As people walk by, they chat and wave. We can usually count on seeing Lou and Marnie, for one. They stopped by this time in the middle of a walk and Lou asked Marnie, on leaving, whether she’d prefer to walk back via the beach or the tiny path that passes for the Lane. Marnie’s vote was to take the road.
Lou pointed at me. “You’ve only been married a few years, so pay attention to how I handle this,” he said. He turned to his wife. “Yes, dear. Whatever you’d like, dear.”
Last year, Lou and Vince played me and Todd in tennis. Combine the ages on our side of the net and you approach the younger of the two on the other side. Still, to use a colloquialism from my generation, The older guys whooped our asses. Twice.
Vince and Georgene are on this mailing list. Knowing that I report my life’s events to people they don’t know, they regarded me this visit with a wary eye, making occasional mention of “making the newsletter.” I figured they were overdue anyway, but the flies clinched it. The huge swarms of black, biting flies.
Putting up a screen tent, dancing and swatting between steps of assembly, Vince yelled at me, “Oh boy, looks like we’re going to make the newsletter this time!”
Don’t let his faux concern fool you. He was totally digging for a mention.
Here’s the thing about Pelee’s black flies. Having been hardened by life with non-potable water, questionable plumbing, no grocery store, and FedEx overnight deliveries that take a week to arrive, they’ve become the Delta Force of insects. OFF doesn’t work. A strange and suspect menthol fly balm doesn’t work. Dish soap (which, really, why the hell would it work) doesn’t work. Butter doesn’t work. Although to be fair, it’s possible that these remedies didn’t work because the person who kept handing them to me as fly repellants could just have been seeing what else I’d fall for.
In the end, the tent saved us. As in, as soon as we put it up, the flies vanished.
Flies aren’t the rule. But they aren’t the exception, either. You take what you get. But it’s worth the flies and the death planes and the non-flushed toilets because going to Pelee is like stepping back in time. That place, it’s what the world used to be — what it’s supposed to be like. We learn jokes to boot. And, why the big paws?
The Apple House Rules
In the fall, I make pies. Apple pies. I’m aware that this is woefully unmanly, that if I’m going to be announcing my autumnal activities, I should talk about chopping wood or something. Like, I’ll bet Clint Eastwood doesn’t bake pies. And if he does, they’re probably cooked in the fires of Mount Doom, filled with dead hippies and broken dreams.
Me, I use apples.
There’s a ritual to this. I sit in front of the TV with a big bag of orchard apples, a cutting board, and a little razor-sharp paring knife. The apples have to come from an orchard, I have to be on the couch, and I have to be watching the John Carpenter movie In the Mouth of Madness. Unbelievably, In the Mouth of Madness was largely panned at Cannes and Sundance. It’s about a horror author who writes his horrors into existence and thus drives the whole world insane. Much rubber cement was used by the special effects department to create monster slime.
So I sit, and I watch, and I make an apple pie. It’s an autumn thing.
If you put the cut apples into a solution of water and lemon juice, they won’t turn brown. It’s not at all masculine that I know this. If you cut slits in the top pie crust, it will lie flatter. If you cut these slits in an artsy way, the pie will look neat. Putting a pie on a windowsill to cool is an antiquated notion. If you do this for real, the pie will slide off, draw flies, or be toppled and eaten by your pets. In any of these cases, you pie’s aesthetic appeal declines substantially.
So I’ve got this routine, just like my routine of reading The Shining every winter. And the other day, my wife Robin and I go to the grocery store. And Robin picks up this big bag of apples. And — get this — she puts it in our cart.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Getting apples. To make a pie or something.”
“But the apples have to come from the orchard,” I told her.
“But they’re the same apples,” she said.
They were. They were in the paper bag with the little paper handle, set aside and marked as being “orchard fresh.” They were smaller than the big, waxy apples in the produce bins. Same apples, all right.
“But when you make pies, you have to get the apples at the orchard,” I said.
“They’re the same apples,” she said. “And the orchard is a half-hour away.”
She didn’t understand. The apples have to come from an orchard. They have to. And it’s not even like we get to pick them off the trees or anything. When you go to the orchard, you walk into a little store building and pick up the same apples in the same paper bag with the little paper handle and you pay for them at the register. The only real difference is that it’s a lot more crowded and you have to park on the grass.
So, despite the fact that Robin was absolutely right, she was so wrong. The apples have to come from an orchard. Yeah, well. This is the woman who will dissect a meal to remove any trace of tomato, onion, celery, beans, green pepper, red pepper, tuna, etcetera. After she’s done eating, she’s got this little cadaver pile of excised ingredients. I’ll make stuffed peppers and she’ll remove the pepper. She once asked me to make chili without beans or onions.
“So,” I said, “just the wet beef, then?”
This is the woman who’s afraid of cruise control like some technophobic octogenarian, who likes spaghetti sauce and pizza sauce and salsa but will send a salad back to the kitchen if a tomato has touched the lettuce. This is who’s telling me that it makes more sense to get the apples that are right in front of me instead of driving an hour to get literally the exact same thing. I mean, really.
“We can’t get those,” I said.
She did this really condescending thing with her eyes — the look she uses to convey the message that I am mentally impaired — and put the apples in the cart.
Later, walking by an empty display that said “Cider,” she said, “Oh damn, I would have liked some cider.” So I suggested another place to find cider and we put the apples back and I won the battle in the end.
Ha.
So I make my pies, and my dad tries to get me into making soup. You start with a bottle of wine and a few cans of chicken broth. You throw in a bunch of vegetables and herbs and spices, and it’s magically supposed to become gourmet. I make soup and it comes out tasting like Tang. Go figure. Dad can just throw things into a pot; I don’t know how he does it. And it comes out really, really good. So I told him about making pies, and about how the apples absolutely, positively, must come from that stupid little shop at the head of the orchard, and he agreed with me.
I come by this naturally, it seems.
The last time Robin and I went to visit my father, he whipped up his famous pasta sauce. It was great, as it always is. The next morning, over breakfast at this little greasy spoon diner, he’s got this remorseful look on his face and he apologizes for the pasta the other night.
“Why?” I said.
“It was horrible. I feel really bad about it.”
“You feel bad about what?”
“The pasta. I apologize. It was so bad, I just feel awful.”
And so on. He apologized a few more times for the pasta throughout the trip, totally serious. The other day, he told me over the phone that he had finally pulled the remainder of the batch out of the freezer (he cooks mess-hall style — a year’s worth at a time) and thrown it away.
“You know, that horrible pasta from when you came to visit last time.”
I was making turkey tetrazini. That word literally means “four zinis.” I had the phone wedged between my ear and my shoulder and was dumping broth into the two pots on the stove. That’s two, one-two, because the smaller pot was for Robin. You know — no onion, no celery.
“You’re still worried about that pasta?”
“It was like Franco-American.”
What was I supposed to say? I used to love Spaghetti-Os.
So Dad tells me about the pasta, insulting it posthumously now, and refers to it as being “Day-Glo orange.” And we talk about The Sopranos, which I don’t follow because I’m too cheap to get HBO. It’s like we were supposed to have been born Italian or something. I’m making tetrazini, wondering what’s tetra about it and for that matter what a zini is so that I can go get four of them. I hear Dad’s little espresso machine steaming up in the background. And I totally start to wish I could pepper my speech with, “Hey! Whatsamatta you?” and call people paisan. I make him an offer he don’t refuse.
There’s one piece of the last pie in the fridge right now. You’d think I’d get tired of the making new ones, of peeling apples, of watching Jurgen Prochnow as horror novelist Sutter Cane and Sam Neill as investigator John Trent. I don’t. It’s ritual. It’s like, I have to do it. You know? Capisce?
Why Linus Never Found the Great Pumpkin
For the longest time, my aunt has been trying to get the rest of the family to come down to Circleville, Ohio for the annual Pumpkin Show. My wife Robin and I inexplicably started going a few years ago. We went when we lived in Columbus. We still go now that we live near Cleveland, even though it’s a three-hour drive. If you’ve never been to Pumpkin Show, that drive might seem excessive. If, on the other hand, you have been to Pumpkin show, you’ll know that it is, in fact, excessive.
Meet Sarah and Mike Glazzman — the other half of our Pumpkin Show cadre. Sarah is a friend of mine from way back, and I think she picked up Mike at a highway rest stop or something in the years following high school. For the past three years, the four of us have made our way down to Circleville to walk around and partake of a pumpkin-laden atmosphere.
It’s a wonderland.
At the Circleville Pumpkin Show, you can peer through a window and see the world’s largest pumpkin pie. It’s about six feet across. Pumpkin Show lasts four days and we always go on the last night, so the world’s largest pumpkin pie always has a lot of green mold growing in its cracks by the time we see it.
At the Circleville Pumpkin Show, you can buy pumpkin donuts, pumpkin waffles, pumpkin ice cream, pumpkin fudge, pumpkin pie, pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin taffy, pumpkin brittle, pumpkin burgers, pumpkin cream puffs, pumpkin fritters, pumpkin bread, pumpkin pancakes, and of course, pumpkin sticky buns. I’m only getting started. There’s a sort of Pumpkin Show Santa who walks around wearing orange sweatpants and an orange Santa hat while playing a guitar painted to look like a pumpkin. There’s Pumpkin Man, who wears an orange helmet and face paint and glides around on roller skates. Fair-type rides look like pumpkins while simultaneously looking highly unsafe. This year, I saw in the official Pumpkin Show publication that Buddy Conley, who has a cowboy hat and handlebar mustache, won the “Largest Pumpkin” contest with his 897 lb. monster. If you didn’t actually go to Pumpkin Show, you might be duped by this misinformation. There must have been a late entry, because we saw the real winner in person. It weighed 932 pounds. If I were Buddy, I’d be angry that someone outdid me.
I’m noticing now, with unspeakable regret, that I’ve never seen the hog-calling contest. We did see a line-dancing demonstration. It is physically impossible for people to be whiter than when they’re line-dancing.
On most of the streets, people mill aimlessly. If you stay too long, you’ll get trapped by the Queens Parade — the longest parade known to man. The parade circles the festival zone so that nobody can escape. In the Queens Parade, approximately five billion teen queens ride by on floats and wave at the crowd. There’s the Pumpkin Show queen, the Pickaway County queen, fair queens, other festival queens, the Wal-Mart queen, the Quaker Steak & Lube queen, and so on.
In the streets, before the Queens Parade, Mike will stand and watch the taffy stretching machine for hours if you let him. Last year, after noticing Mike’s absence, I looked back and there he was — frozen in front of a vendor’s booth, watching long loops of taffy go around and around and around.
“It’s amazing,” he said.
“It is hypnotic,” Paul agreed. Paul’s a guy who went with us last year. He’s this exceedingly jolly 40-something gay man Sarah works with.
“It’s beautiful,” Mike said.
That was when I noticed the hookers.
“Look,” I said. “Hookers.” I shrugged toward the two young girls in short skirts and black stockings. They were relatively exposed despite the chill and had their hair teased up into frozen curls.
“Those are the queens,” Sarah said.
Then Paul told us about a shirt he had seen the other day. “It said, ‘I’ll be your friend if you’ll be my piece of ass,’” he said. He giggled excessively.
This year we saw three people wearing strobe-light earrings. Two of them were men. We saw a woman wearing a T-shirt that read, “I’m on the brink of insanity and you just ticked me off.” Another woman was carrying a framed drawing of deceased rapper Tupac Shakur. Mike ended up in front of the taffy machine again.
On their first night away from their three-week-old baby, Sarah and Mike were like freed birds. They watched taffy. They walked the busy streets of Circleville, people-watching. We all talked about how having a difficult last name (like mine, or like Glazzman) is annoying because you constantly have to spell it for people, and we fantasized about having an easier handle — like “Thompson.” We ate Pumpkin donuts. We looked at the big, moldy pie. On the way back, we ate dinner at The Spaghetti Warehouse. They asked how many were in our party. Mike said four. They asked our name. Mike said, “Thompson.”
The girl wrote it down and Mike stopped her, saying, “That’s spelled with an ‘h’.”
While the waiter was ignoring us and a cracked glass was drooling all over our table, I said, “The 897-pound pumpkin guy says he gave that pumpkin 2000 gallons of water every other day.”
“That’s a lot of water,” Robin agreed.
“It says in the Show newspaper that he’s going to give one 2500 gallons next year.”
“Ooh,” said Sarah.
How do they even transport these pumpkins? Do they use forklifts? Can Buddy outdo the guy next year who outdid him this year? I wonder these things. Will Sarah and Mike bring the baby next time? I happen to know that she’s already got a pumpkin outfit, though I wonder if it will still fit in a year. Their dog, who has maybe five or six teeth — he’s got a pumpkin outfit, too. And come to think of it, my mom’s dog Margaret has a pumpkin outfit. I have no pumpkin outfits. Zero. I didn’t know how popular they were.
Every year, I wonder why we do this. And every year, we come back. It must be the taffy. Or that ridiculous moldy pie. Or maybe the hookers.