The no-paper problem

Okay, so my three-year-old $200 Brother laser printer was acting up, telling me that there was no paper in its tray even though there was plenty and it was nice fresh paper. Besides that, it was printing really light because it was needing a new hundred dollar drum and probably a toner cartridge to boot. So I went to Office Depot, and found there was a $100 Brother laser printer and so I bought it. I got it home, hooked it up, loaded the new software, and then the new printer told me that it had no paper in it when it did have paper in it, nice fresh paper from a just-opened package. I would suggest there was an evil spirit lurking in my cable, but I used different cables for the different printers. Could the problem be inside the computer? Could a virus trick my printer into feeling empty? I'll confess, I've been feeling a little empty myself. If you turn either of the printers off and then back on, then for a little while, both of them print; that's sort of like the kick in the ass we might need to remind us to be grateful for all we have, paper or whatever

The new chic

Christopher rolls his eyes and scoffs when the fashion issue of The New Yorker arrives. He shows me the back cover, a Gucci ad featuring two leather clad dames in clownish white wigs, their mouths set in fierce disappointment. Look, Christopher says, their flight has just been cancelled. He says the new chic pose for models must be to look as though they've just received horrible news. He turns to a page near the beginning, a Jil Sander ad, in which a tired blonde has just perhaps been informed that her new baby, well, has special needs. An Elie Tahari ad features a woman who can barely lift her head; it's obvious she's just learned she has herpes. A Tod's ad features a woman on a park bench, who is watching her child's nanny being mauled by a pit bull. In the Prada ad, the woman witnesses, through attractive plastic glasses frames, a bus accident involving school children. In the Max Mara ad, Christopher says, the poor woman has just been shot in the back. In the Dolce & Gabbana ad, some women are dressed as aristrocrats; a serving wench has just informed them that the peasants are storming the gate.

3001 Sit-Ups

When I was fifteen, I did 3001 sit-ups. Miss Ashby, our gym teacher, was administering a fitness test of some kind, and when it got to the sit-up part, I just kept going. My feet were hooked under the edge of the bleachers, which is not the way sit-ups are done nowadays, but this was way back when. My hands were on the back of my head, elbows out. So I kept doing the sit-ups all through the class, first hour, and when it was over, Miss Ashby said, why don't you keep going? So I kept going for a few hours, through her other classes having their physical fitness test. Different people kept count with me during the different classes. I might have been able to go on forever, but I was getting kind of tired after three hours or so, and my hair was all matted at the back of my head where my hands were in my hair, and I was pretty sweaty, and I felt like an exhibit at a zoo, especially since kids were coming into the gym during their lunchtime. So for the last half hour, from about 2700 and beyond I trying to figure out what was a good number to end on, and I was looking for a prime number so that nobody could do half as many sit-ups as me, nor a third as many, mor a quarter, a fifth... You just focus on odd things in such as situation as that. I got this idea that 3001 was a prime, and then I had all kinds of time to try and divide it by different numbers to convince myself it was a prime number. So I quit there at 3001, and I went in the locker room and discovered that somebody had stolen my pants out of my locker. I tried without success to get my fingers through the snarled mass at the back of my head and so configured a pony tail over it. Some people said, oh, that must be a record, so I looked up the record in the Guiness book and found that some ten year old girl did over 10,000 sit-ups. Poor kid, I thought the next day, when my abdomen ached like nothing before or since; laughing hurt the most.

Three legged squirrel signals autumn

Saw a three-legged squirrel today, on the tree outside my office, unable to get on the bird feeder. He ran just as fast as the other squirrels but in shorter bursts with rests between. No telling what he's been through, or maybe it's a she. No telling if she'll survive the winter. Dead bunny in the road last night, the body gone by morning, eaten by some hungry creature. It's cold enough inside the house for vests and insulated shirts and a hat but too early to turn on the furnace. Water leaked into our house last time it rained, came in through a window, ran down a wall, pooled in Christopher's office, on the slate floor I laid for him years ago. How in the hell did I ever find the energy to lay slate, to learn to lay slate, to drag home that many heavy boxes of slate? Today I argued with Christopher as together we installed a gutter we've been meaning to hang for a decade, both of us up on ladders, both of us with our theories. Every year he gets a little older, goddamn it, just like my mother and everybody else. One of my brothers has so much rage I can't even talk to him on the phone. Some leaves are turning yellow already; soon they'll be clogging that newly hung gutter. Now that the shine and stink and whorish ease of summer have passed, there's the problem of food and shelter. Then there's all the struggles around us, the broken among us; god, there are so many creatures needing love, all of them worth loving.

Chip etiquette

In the house of self and you, darling husband, the house in which I purchase and store chips for your pleasure and convenience, please consider the following guidelines:

1. Please do not open a bag of chips if there is already a bag of chips open, unless the new bag of chips differs significantly enough from the open bag of chips that one might consider it a different food altogether. For example, if the salt and pepper kettle chips are open, please do not open the Cape Cod chips; however, it is acceptable for you to open the organic nacho cheese corn chips.

2. Please strongly consider carrying your chips from the kitchen to the dining room on a plate. Should you choose not to use a plate, please be sure you have a firm grip on each chip that you are carrying into the dining room. This was not a problem when we had a dog, but we no longer have a dog.

3. Please close the bags of chips when you are done. If you are not sure whether or not you are done with the chips for the evening, then err on the side of crispness and close the bag. If you have torn the bag all down the side while opening the chips, then please put the entire bag of chips inside a a two-gallon sized ziplock bag and seal that.

First full day out of the hospital, at my house

Mom, Can I make you a melted cheese sandwich?
What's that going to be like?
I can make it any way you want. Broiled? Fried in a pan?
Just give me some bread with some cheese.
Cold?
No, warmed up.
I'll put it in the toaster oven to melt the cheese.
I've never had a toaster oven. Loring dragged one over, but I don't know what the hell he did with it.

Nurse D.

The night shift nurses were unremarkable in their flower-patterned scrubs or smocks, with their sullen or perky or hateful demeanors, ineffectual followers-of-orders, stolid in their absorption of patient information, dull in their asking of questions, in their pausing to accommodate bouts of vomiting and explosive shitting. A doctor wandered through, in the gray light, like a prey animal drinking at the water hole before dawn, studying a chart with a flashlight, hoping for one more day to pass without his being torn to shreds by a predator or sued by a patient. The sun rose as the shift changed and there was Nurse D., bright enough that I had to blink and shade my eyes. She wore white, bleached white, white delicious in its medical formality. She read my mother’s chart with vigor, demanded an explanation from the night nurse about the size of a dose of Atavan, called a doctor, ordered a test, explained to me the dangers and causes of the infection C-difficile, all the while maintaining excellent posture. Her stockings were white, her shoes white, soft-soled, plenty comfortable for her twelve-hour shift. She was not even a transvestite as I had first assumed she must be in that white hat, attached with eight bobby pins to shining black hair. But trust my studious eye that she was original woman, archetypal female nurse-animal, solid and curved with full woman shape, her waist decorated with a narrow belt attached to the uniform. My depleted mother was flat on the bed, disastrous with infection and misery, but now that her case was in those strong, clean hands, hope blossomed in the room. Throughout my forty-four years I have brimmed with health, have kept my body fine and whole, have exercised and eaten right. For the first time in twenty-four hours I rolled my shoulders up, down and back and sighed in relief; for the first time ever, I considered without terror that some day I myself might be a patient.

Eat Puffball Mushrooms

Go out in the yard and look around, especially near the edge of the woods. If you see something resembling a half deflated softball or volleyball, then pick it up and take it in the house and fry it in butter. Maybe you ought to slice it first. Some in our family call the puffball mushroom nature's tofu. If it is brown, then do not eat it. Read the old Joy of Cooking for more details; the new Joy seems to have decided the puffball is out of fashion, for it does not appear in those pages. What is the world coming to?

Susanna re-hydrates

Susanna dehydrated carries infections to hospital. Sometimes she throws up, she tells the nurse, who plants pills in a spoon-mound of pudding. Bruised from falling, now under observation, she is a person who has never wanted attention. She has always loved her house, her desk, her feet up, drink in hand (even as she sleeps she raises hands to her face and her lips touch phantom tumblers or fruit jars, phantom cigarettes.) She wanted to stay home, vomiting, shrinking, until she faded away without fuss, listening to people say funny things, throwing in her two cents. She refuses to lie still in the hospital bed, refuses to wait for the staff to come help her to the toilet; this is what the staff means when they tell me tell me she is a problem. "I'd rather be home crawling on my hands and knees up to the barnyard," she says. No matter how they or we beg her to please call the nurse, at the urge, she slides off the bed, moves toward the portable toilet; no matter how weak her legs, no matter the logic of those who stroll in and out of her room effortlessly, she will not let herself be tangled in those bedsheets.

Conversation deteriorates but the food holds up

Christopher and I had fun Saturday with Mary, Nancy, Jan and Mike, on the occasion of Mary’s 50th birthday. Over bottles of champagne and good red wine, guacamole, grilled chicken, roasted sweet potatoes and pulverized spinach, we discussed Mike’s idea for a personal hygiene product that might some day make him rich, especially when it becomes available in a variety of colors and sizes and in holiday themes. Out there on the deck, with a background of chickadees and finches, we discussed architecture, mental health, and wild birds, and then the conversation naturally moved on to the subject of sex with animals. Christopher repeated the story my mother tells about the Jersey milk cow (reported to have beautiful eyes) owned by the G. family in Richland. The boys used to rent out the family cow to other neighborhood boys. Well, as a result of carelessness, the cow got loose and was hit and killed on the road, and the boys felt terrible. When they told their father, to their surprise, he wept openly into his hands—apparently his relationship with her was deeper than the boys had realized. My story was one I had heard from a veterinarian's receptionist. A distressed woman brought in a hen for an autopsy. If I tell you that divorce soon followed, then perhaps you can guess about the autopsy results. Sometimes I wonder if Christopher and I are the right kind of conversationalists. Nancy had baked and frosted a yellow cake for Mary’s birthday, and we ate it up with coffee. Yum.

For sale

In my VW pick-up, there is a hot water heater that has been unjustly scorned by numerous people, including my Aunt Joanna, who is from Boston, and the people at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale Michigan, where people read Ayn Rand. Paul Harvey talks about Hillsdale college on the radio, and the bent seems to be decidedly libertarian. If anyone wants the hot water heater, it is yours for $150, which includes tax. It is a forty-gallon 4500-watt lowboy, made in Michigan, and has four years left on its warranty. It may have been filled up with water once, but it has never been used. I'll even deliver it to you if you live nearby. Earlier todayI stopped by a yard sale behind the Chicken Coop and found a car that runs for only $400, and the guy said that price is negotiable. He also had some black lights there for sale; he said he can't even look at them without smelling bong water. Also, if you're driving along Red Arrow Highway, be sure to stop at roadside stands to buy peaches, glorious peaches!