Operators Are Standing By!
On my desk are several piles. One is a stack of photos, including a fantastic shot of me with two of Bill Clinton’s secret service agents — the agent on the left having announced that for this particular shot, he would be “the stoic one.” Another pile is of CDs. The neatest and largest pile is on top of my filing cabinet, comprised of instructional tape series on loan from my mother. I need to remember to return them next time I head back toward her place because Joel Silverman’s Hollywood Dog Training Program is among them.
Mom sent the Hollywood Dog Training Program my way when my wife Robin and I adopted our black mutt, Monty. She was able to send it because she already had it, and she had it because she apparently owns a very persuasive television. When my mother saw the HDTP infomercial, visions of Lassie and Spuds McKenzie began to dance in her head. Before she bought the program, the sad truth is that her dogs were not in the least Hollywood. None surfed. None alerted her of children who had fallen down local wells. None voted, or at least didn’t do so often. But now, months and a hundred dollars later, her house contains only dogs who are not in the least Hollywood.
CASE STUDY #1:
Name: Margaret
Summary: A wiry-haired terrier who can jump straight up off of all four legs at once, to waist level. Like most of our past and present dogs, Margaret “named herself,” meaning that we let her live with us for a few weeks until we spontaneously started to call her Margaret. The spell did not, apparently, affect my stepbrother Jason, so my mother affixed a note to the top of his shoe. Whenever he looked down to see a wiry gray thing at his feet, he was thus able to name it.
Prior training: Invisible Fence
Margaret was trained to stay inside an Invisible Fence. The system is simple: A line is buried around the perimeter of the yard, and dogs wear collars which beep as they approach the boundary line. If a dog does not turn around, the beeping speeds up and eventually the collar administers a small correctional shock.
Our other dogs learned the system quickly, but Margaret would sit down, dumbfounded, if the collar began to beep. You had to remove the collars when the dogs came inside, because the loop started and ended in the basement, making parts of the house Invisible Fence forbidden zones. One time, someone forgot to remove Margaret’s collar and when it began to beep, she ran to her bed for safety. As luck would have it, her bed actually resided on top of the boundary line. Perplexed, Margaret remained in bed and was beeped at and shocked until my mother rescued her.
Results: To this day, Margaret is terrified of high-pitched beeping. Phones, watches, microwaves — all make Margaret tremble in fear. My stepfather Todd also declares that Margaret eats poop.
CASE STUDY #2
Name: Connie
Summary: An arthritic Black and Tan Coonhound who receives extensive praise for simply existing. Among the kudos bestowed upon Connie by Todd are “Her likes to do things,” “Her stands around,” and “Her breathes air.” When her is not actually doing things, Todd often points out that her thinkin her might like-a do things. During the remaining time, Connie lies comatose on the couch, buried in pillows. If she is summoned, the tip of her tail will thump excitedly while everything else remains motionless.
Prior training: Dog intelligence test
My mother once read in a magazine about a dog intelligence test. The test is administered by draping a kitchen towel over the dog’s head and observing how long it takes the dog to get it off. Kuzi, our Husky, shook the towel away immediately. Connie paced leisurely from room to room wearing it like a babushka, then laid down and went to sleep. Margaret cowered in a corner with the towel covering her like a shroud.
“She thinks she’s being punished,” Mom explained.
Results: No Hollywood dogs in the house.
Now, in all fairness to Joel Silverman, one possible reason for the program’s failure may have been that it was never actually used. The thrill of an infomercial for my mother is the purchase, not the use – although the use of some of these buys have yielded spectacular results. Consider our Ron Popeil pasta maker with the interchangeable extrusion nozzles. Mom used it for a while after seeing the infomercial, deciding to take Ron Popeil’s suggestion and try the delicious chocolate pasta.
Results: Pasta should never be chocolate. Under penalty of death.
We have a salad spinner, which makes washing greens easy and painless. We have several massagers for soothing tight neck muscles. In the basement is an exercise machine which you use by pulling the handles forward while simultaneously thrusting your hips out. This works your legs, abs, back, and arms all at once without the trouble of firing up your CD player to actually do the Hustle. There are three or four other pieces of equipment down there, too. I don’t know the official name of any. We call them, “that things the laundry is hanging on.”
There’s a hand blender that can make mayonnaise out of egg whites as easily as it can make fruit smoothies. I talked her out of that.
Then one day, I saw an infomercial for an inside-the-shell egg scrambler. You simply impale an egg on a needle and push a button to spin the needle rapidly inside the egg’s shell. When you crack the egg open, it’s already scrambled.
I thought this was a hilarious idea, so I called my mother into the room. She copied the number down and a struggle over the phone ensued as I tried to save her from herself.
But it’s getting better. She’s either improving or running out of money. I never saw the RonCo rotisserie (”Just set it… and forget it!”) or the VacuSeal storage bags which can collapse a closetful of clothes to the size of a suitcase. And as incredible as it seems, I never saw George Foreman’s “Lean, Mean, Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine” on my mother’s countertop.
No, that was one that Dad fell for.
Matters of Life and Death
As some of you know, I’m a writer. (Evidence of this comes from the fact that what you are reading was written.) As some of you further know, I’ve written a novel. People ask me when they’ll get to read the novel. When it’s published, I tell them. Then I tell them that this seems likely to occur around the time the sun burns down to a small glowing space rock — when monkeys rule the dark Earth and raid our refrigerators because we’re in no position to stop them.
People nod sympathetically and say that rejection must be terrible. I tell them that it’s not terrible; it’s really no big deal. It’s not like flesh-eating bacteria, I tell them, or like watching The English Patient. I’ll add that we writers have more pressing problems, even in our own mundane lives. Take eyestrain, I say. Take papercuts. Or take the fate of an elderly gentleman I saw at a writer’s conference, who interrupted the instructor repeatedly to announce that he was an opera singer. “I have a computer,” he declared, “and I have a mouse. And I can’t stay on top of that icon. What do you have to say about that?”
“It’s a problem,” the instructor agreed.
The trials of writers — from rejection to uncooperative computers — are many, but we take them all in stride. Rejection is something you get used to, as is using a mouse properly. It’s not a problem. It’s not a matter of life and death. Matters of life and death include drought, famine, and olive loaf. And death, of course.
Consider Mr. P, the curmudgeony owner of a previous place of my employment: The Frostee Barn. I didn’t used to like Mr. P, back when he was my slave-driving boss. I’ve come to appreciate him in recent years — mostly due to his bad jokes, his love of MTV’s show Jackass, and his stylish ‘do rag which makes him look like an aging member of the Crips street gang. So, when I learned last weekend that he had died of a heart attack, I was saddened.
I called Stacy, who is Mr. P’s right-hand woman. “I heard about Mr. P,” I told her, my voice low and sedate.
“What about him?” she asked. Apparently the lines of communication surrounding Mr. P were less than perfect.
“I heard he died.”
“Really?” she said.
But Mr. P was not dead. Mr. P had just gotten back from Florida, where he had been enjoying all sorts of off-season antics. He was probably, at that moment, wearing his ‘do rag and watching Jackass, brewing up another side-splitter about a hooker with a wooden leg. Stacy told me as much after calling Bill Hendrix, who was the sort of person privy to such inside information.
“It must have been another Mr. P,” she told me. “There was an obituary about a week ago: ‘Business owner “Mr. P” dies of heart attack.’ Mr. P’s real name is Larry, and this guy’s wasn’t, but nobody knows Mr. P’s real name. Someone must have assumed that it was him in the paper.”
And what an unfounded notion! What were they thinking? Just because this other guy was a business owner in Toledo who went primarily by “Mr. P”? Because he died of a heart attack, for which our own chronically-angry Mr. P is candidate #1? How many Mr. Ps could there be?
“There are a lot of them,” answered my friend Chet’s grandmother, who everyone simply called “Granny.” She was speaking of the Mr. P abundance in the same way a hunter might talk about deer overpopulation while dishing out piles of waffles. The “Sweathearts” waffle iron chirped ridiculously in the background to announce that more waffles were ready. “You can borrow that anytime,” Granny added of the chirping iron, gesturing into the kitchen. “I have two waffle irons.”
“There are a lot of Mr. Ps?”
Chet nodded. “They’re everywhere.” He then shoveled a wad of bacon into his mouth and declared it to be “vebby gooft. Mmmp.”
This was a relief. Not only was our Mr. P safe and sound, but there were apparently plenty of spares should anything bad happen.
When Stacy told me of Mr. P’s well-being, I paid only enough attention to be relieved. I decided that it would now be ill-advised for me to pay final respects to Mr. P in my next newsletter. I noted this, then got off the phone and back to the work that had been distracting me: digging trenches through our barn to drain three inches of standing water from its center. Our horses whinnied their approval. They were all standing in the backs of their stalls, avoiding the encroaching puddles as if they were poison.
“Relax,” I told them. “It’s not a matter of life and death.” Surprisingly, they took me at my word.
The barn eventually drained — somewhat — and I let the horses outside so that they could begin attempting to kill and/or maim themselves. This happened when the five hundred pound baby, Oscar, ran into the fence at full gallop and annihilated it. He shook the collision off matter-of-factly and began making his way into the front yard. If the fence didn’t kill him, he wanted to see if the road could.
“Stay,” I told the other two, who were staring at the destroyed fence. Zoe, who embodies the lethal combination of big and dumb, chose to disobey me and followed Oscar to the road. Leroy, who is slightly less big and slightly less dumb, resumed eating. This was either obedience or apathy, but I never did ask him which.
Two cans of oats and a half hour later, I had successfully played the shepherd and rounded up my flock. Life and death status: Temporarily averted.
My father-in-law and I spent a fair amount of time repairing the fence the following weekend. With yet another day lost to repairing big dumb animal damage, I quelled my frustration because this, like the flooding, was not a matter of life and death.
But for real: one week, two close calls. First Mr. P escapes the reaper’s blade, and then Oscar plays real-life Frogger and lives to tell the tale. I decided to watch my back because learned people say that these things happen in threes.
I wondered: if Mr. P came over to our horse pasture and broke through our fence, would he be as unscathed as Oscar was? Would he have wandered out to the road? Would he have come to me when I shook a coffee can of oats at him? It was an interesting quandary. And while I was imagining Mr. P — ‘do rag flapping in the wind — crashing through the sixteen-foot 2×6 like a runner breaking a ribbon at the finish line, I forgot about my latest rejection letter. When I discovered it later, I smiled and chuckled. The agent had liked the concept of my novel but couldn’t work with its execution. I didn’t know what this meant and didn’t care. I looked up a few more agents and sent out a few more letters. I hung the latest response on the Wall o’ Rejection, where all my denials go. I’m looking at the Wall now. It’s not a bad thing. It’s not a heart attack. It’s not a sturdy wooden fence. It’s not a matter of life and death, and at least I didn’t have to return from the grave — from, if Granny is to be believed, an inexhaustible wellspring of spare Mr. Ps — in order to receive those letters.
And life is grand. Whenever I want the chirping waffle iron, all I have to do is ask. Granny told me so.
Flies in the Coffee
When I make mistakes nowadays, I tell myself that it’s all right, that I’m too busy to think. I used to have time, I remind myself, but I recently have had a lot going on. I had more time to think back when I was a grad student. I’d think: What’s the logic of low-fat Twinkies? Why is water wet? And why does paper beat rock?
That one was a stumper. I’d sit in the Atrium Cafeteria with a cup of coffee and I’d think, Scissors cut paper; rock smashes scissors. Supposedly paper covers rock, but I didn’t see how this was a defeat unless rock was afraid of the dark. If anything, rock was a natural paperweight and wasn’t about to let paper get the best of it, all other things being equal. I did a lot of this type of musing. It put off going back to work.
When I started my molecular genetics fellowship at Case Western Reserve, I figured it would be pretty cool. I was incorrect — because of the flies, and because of the coffee.
The former were fruit flies — Drosophila melanogaster to those of you in the know. My job was to knock them out and push them around under a microscope with a tiny paintbrush. Four to five hundred flies lived in a bottle, twenty-four bottles made up a tray, and I ran through eighty trays. Of these million flies, I was supposed to find the ones with red eyes and crush them with a mortar and pestle to extract their DNA. The others were doomed to die in a jar of chemicals. Some escaped and lived among us, capering in the everpresent yeasty stank of their bottled brethren. Then they died in the corners and we stepped on them.
The coffee was a bigger problem. Because some groups were using tiny amounts of radioactive substances, no food was allowed in the labs. I put a coffee machine in the small eating area and would run to it every few minutes for a sip. Eventually, I just started leaving each morning for about an hour. I set a timer on the coffee machine so that I could escape in stealth. Each night, I’d fill it with grounds and water. Each morning, I’d find the grounds set aside and water in the decanter and I’d have to start from scratch.
“Is someone messing with the coffee machine?” I’d ask people. It was mine, after all. I had labeled it in large letters.
“Coffee?” they’d say. “Does this have anything to do with fruit flies?”
Soon, I began to disappear in the afternoons, too. It was the university’s fault. They said I could use my time however I liked. I liked using it to explore. For example, you can get from the parking garage behind the Rite-Aid on Euclid to the far corner of the old medical school on Adelbert without going outside. It’s over a mile and takes around twenty minutes. It took me months to discover this.
Meanwhile, the coffee problem intensified. I re-labeled the machine. I attached a large note to it which said not to take the grounds out and not to reset the timer. When this didn’t work (I could never catch the culprit; he or she was sneaky), I added a larger sign informing everyone that it was my machine and not a departmental one, and that if you were going to mess with it, the least you could do would be to put things back the way you found them.
Still, every day, the grounds were set aside. Every day, the decanter was filled with clear hot water. My frustration with the entire situation grew.
I started to take more breaks. I sneaked out whenever I could, to think. I thought about how “snuck” isn’t a word but “sneaked” is, and how “forte” is pronounced “fort” and not “fortay,” and about how if you said either of these two things correctly, people thought you were a moron.
Every day, hot water sat in my coffee machine. Flies buzzed around me. They smelled bad. And around the time my advisor called me into her office for a chat, I finally caught someone using my coffee machine. She was a short, timid Chinese woman.
“Have you been using this machine every morning?” I asked her.
“Yes.”
“Have you noticed these signs?”
“Yes.”
I shrugged.
“I need hot water for tea,” she explained.
“Use the microwave at the other end of the building,” I suggested.
“I’d have to walk all the way down there,” she said, gesturing at the fifty-yard distance. “This machine is right here.”
“But it’s mine,” I told her. “And I want my coffee ready when I get here. So use the microwave, okay? And don’t touch this, okay? My lab stinks and my job is pushing flies around. You can understand that, right? Stinky lab? Pushing flies? I need this thing, this one thing, to be there for me when I need it. Otherwise, I’m just going to have to let all of the flies go. ‘Be free! Be free!’ I’ll yell!”
She glared at me. I wondered if she would start spitting in my coffee.
My advisor called me in later. “You have to decide if scientific research is worth your attention,” she said. “You always wear your headphones and you seem not to be interested in the conversations around you.”
“Pretty much,” I agreed.
“I don’t think your head is in this,” she told me.
“In that belief, you would be correct,” I said.
“I’d hate to have to…” and here she paused, making a vague gesture. We both knew what it meant. It didn’t mean expulsion, because I was getting A’s and doing good work. It didn’t mean firing, because I wasn’t really an employee, though I did draw a stipend. It was more like rejection. Nobody wants an unenthusiastic grad student hanging around for five years. She was trying to be gentle. She thought I wanted to stay.
“I’m actually going to be quitting,” I told her.
I was gone a month later, having agreed to finish my project so as not to leave them hanging. I left my stinky fruit flies behind. I also left the coffee machine as my contribution to the lab.
“Just watch out for that Chinese woman,” I told them. “She’s a real bitch.”
Becoming One and Offending Squirrels
For me, the event that best symbolized the nature of marriage was the combining of my wife’s and my music collections — merging two separate entities into one. Robin had her CDs. I had mine. The notion of “our CDs” was so foreign to me that it seemed unfathomable. When I was in college, we had “our couch” and “our TV” and even “our washer and dryer,” but CDs were, in my mind, inherently unsharable. They belonged to someone. When Robin and I moved in together, I entertained the idea of keeping them separate out of a sense that anything else would be ludicrous. But then I realized: O holiest of holy cows, I’m no longer just me; I’m half of us. I made myself ready.
“I’m going to combine the CDs,” I told Robin. She was sitting on the couch at the time, which two burly movers had just delivered amongst much sweat and grunting.
“Okay,” she said.
I detected a lack of enthusiasm, a sort of fundamental disrespect for the ceremony of the moment. “I’ve got mine,” I said, pointing at two large boxes of jewel cases. “Where are yours?”
She leaned forward and rummaged through a box at her feet. After a minute, she handed me two CDs. One was the Grease soundtrack, which I had bought for her because she loved it. The other was The Smiths Singles, which I had bought for her because I loved it. Truth be told, renewed access to Singles was the one thing keeping me calm. Once our collections were merged, I could listen to it whenever I wanted.
“I am now going to mix them together,” I announced. “They will no longer be ‘yours’ and ‘mine.’ They will be ‘ours.’ Are you ready?”
“Sure.”
I took a deep breath and laid her two CDs on top of my two hundred plus. They looked pathetic and lonely.
“Let me know when you’re ready to bring the mattresses up,” she said.
It didn’t take me long to realize that Robin was much less awed by the whole marriage thing than I was. I was, in fact, intrigued. As the day drew near, people started to ask me if I was nervous. I wasn’t. Their repeated inquiries slowly convinced me that I probably should be nervous, so I started taking their suggestions and became a basket case.
The big day finally arrived. Like most modern couples, we decided to crap on tradition in the interest of convenience, so I was able to see my bride before the ceremony, during a session with our extraordinarily sweaty photographer. I was amazed. I’d seen wedding gowns before, and I’d seen women in them before. But this was my girlfriend. In a wedding dress. My girlfriend in a wedding dress. I was stupefied; the import of the moment was incredible.
“My girlfriend,” I told her, my eyes wide and amazed, “in a wedding dress. I can’t believe it.”
“Duh,” she replied. “It is our wedding day.”
Again, that disrespect for ceremony. I knew I was in for an interesting ride.
Flash forward a year and a half. We’ve got a house, a dog, two cats, four horses, and two mothers who keep asking us where the grandchildren are. We tell them that we’d be happy to produce some if they’d pay the expenses. Suddenly, they stop asking. We’ve got two fathers who, being men, don’t see the big rush. They score silent victories when we play the financial card.
Robin made the transition easily. Though not a party guy by any means, I had a harder time. It seemed to me that I should be hanging out late. It didn’t matter where; it just seemed the manly thing to do. I have since adjusted and now, along with everyone else our age, we are discovering that we sit around more and go to bed earlier. Like a fortunate few of these people our age, we have embraced it. 11:00 Friday night… Yow! Getting to be late! Our pleasures now take decidedly lamer forms.
Like last weekend, when we went through Toledo on the way home for Easter. We stopped off at The Anderson’s. The Anderson’s, for those of you who aren’t Toledoans, is what you would get if you took Meijer or another superstore, fed it large amounts of amphetamines, and then really pissed it off somehow. As we strolled the aisles and marveled at the extent of the store’s holdings, Robin went into a frenzy.
“We have to buy a pineapple!” she announced.
We took our pineapple and continued wandering. An aisle filled with hundreds of microbrewery beers. Shelving units. Doors and windows. Vast rows of gleaming white toilets. Past these, Robin darted into the pet supplies aisle and began looking through birdfeeders.
“For the cats!” she announced. Since I knew that the cats would likely not eat birdseed, and since I didn’t think she was so macabre as to suggest using it as a death trap, I surmised that she intended to hang it in front of the window to attract birds for the cats to watch. The feeders were around $40 each. I was opposed to the idea but was eventually swayed, seeing how excited she was. We bought one called the “Squirrel-Be-Gone.” The tagline was, “The feeder squirrels hate!”
I’m not kidding.
Since it did seem to be a birdfeeder (instead of a poor choice of squirrel feeder), and because Robin found it attractive, we took it to the checkout along with our pineapple. I can only imagine what the checkout girl thought.
I hung it up yesterday. I have seen no squirrels, so apparently it works pretty well.