The Po Show

Stormy Weather

Okay, now *that* was a thunderstorm!

I'm talking about last Tuesday night. First there was the normal house-rattling thunder and flashes of lightning and downpour of rain. Heh, that doesn't bother me a bit. Then there was hail, big marble sized hail. Hmmm, never seen that during the summer before. Weird. THEN (thankfully after the kids were sound asleep), the hammer dropped. Relentless, pounding thunder, and worse, non-stop strobe light-like lightning. No flash, then pause, then thunder, then another flash a few moments later. This was flashflashflashflashflashflash, seemingly never-ending. Tremendous winds. Sky-opening-up-and-falling-down-upon-us rain.

We just don't have shit like that in CA.

So that was intense and scary, but it passed. However, the next morning we saw the destruction that the storm had left in its wake: HUGE trees down, power lines hanging everywhere, crushed cars under big tree limbs, traffic lights out everywhere.

Then my own personal nightmare hit sometime around 10AM. Our cable modem went out, taking with it our cable TV (totally liveable), phone service (eh, we have cells), and internet connection (WHAT????? NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!).

I literally cannot survive with an internet connection. I couldn't get into my email to get the addresses of the ebay buyers who had paid me, and whom I had promised I'd ship their packages. I couldn't get in my order that night to Gymboree.com, which was beginning Gymbuck redemption (that might not seem like a big deal, but a lot of my ebay business hinges on ordering potentially hard to find items immediately at the beginning of redemption, when I can use all the millions of Gymbucks I spent thousands of dollars earning, then selling the stuff I bought more or less at cost, just to earn these coupons that give $25 off $50).

Thursday morning the cable still wasn't up. I got all my in store Gymboree shopping done (more than I normally would, since I couldn't shop online) and came home, called the cable company again, and was told someone would come to look at our connection between 1 and 8:00. So I sat at home, unable to get to the library to use their computers so I could get online. And no one showed, till 8:20PM. After an hour of fiddling with stuff up on the poles (so I DIDN'T EVEN HAVE TO STAY HOME!! GRRRRR!!!!), whoop!, we were back on!!! I hurriedly put up 44 auctions in less than an hour! Hooray!!!! I need to sell this stuff FAST, before I leave for CA next weekend.

Friday morning we were down again. Grrrrrr. I did get to the library since I wasn't about to stay home again. Late in the day, we were back on again, and it's been okay since.

All right, in the grand scheme of things it wasn't a huge crisis. My family was safe, and unlike 1,000s of people in the area, we retained our electricity. That would have truly been a nightmare. But I really was made aware of how incredibly, ridiculously dependent I am on my stupid (no, no, my lovely, wonderful, cannot-live-without, just in case it's listening) internet connection.

I guess there's just no going back to 1990.

Nutmeg R.I.P.

It's been a week since Nutmeg, Tessa's nursery school class guinea pig, died. He had been staying with us for a week, and last Thursday morning I found him dead in his cage when I woke up in the morning.

No autopsy was performed, but probable cause of death was that he was almost 6 years old and had been a class guinea pig. That's got to be a pretty rough life, getting shuffled from house to house constantly (some child took him home almost every weekend during the school year) and being handled by a rotation of four year olds. He always went with explicit instructions on how to care for him and how he was to be handled (after a previous class guinea pig had been picked up by the leg by a little boy and injured so badly he had to be put to sleep), but still.

He had been ill at intervals during the year, and had lost a bunch of his teeth recently, so it wasn't a huge surprise when he passed. But WHY OH WHY did it have to happen at my house, to my children? Everyone always jokes when they bring home the class pet, that nothing is worse than having the pet die while in your care. That joking is for a reason, whistling past the graveyard. Because the reality is really awful! Of course losing your own pet is a greater tragedy, and certainly we were MUCH less attached to Nutmeg that we would have been to a pet we had raised and loved for a decade or more as part of our family. But I was seized with a sense of panic over having failed miserably at caring for a communal living thing, having killed a pet that was not mine. Of course it was not my or our fault that Nutmeg died, but I was stricken at having to tell the teachers that Nutmeg had expired on my watch. It's terrible, but one of my first thoughts was "Damn it, Nutmeg! Couldn't you have waited till Saturday????"

Even worse of course was telling Tessa and Matthew. This was their first introduction to death. When I realized that Nutmeg was dead, I was absolutely thrown into a panic attack. I had to keep the kids from knowing, at least for the morning. Matthew had to go to his second day of summer workshop (which I had been so anxious about him starting, as it was his first real classroom experience with no support services). Tessa had to go to the dentist to have a filling replaced. Neither of those things would happen if they were distraught about Nutmeg. So I kept the towel on the cage and frenetically bustled about getting us ready as usual, my heart hammering. I took Matthew to school, Tessa to the dentist, then grocery shopping. We stopped at home briefly (she wanted to lift up the towel and say hi to Nutmeg, but I told her he was still resting so we should leave him alone. "Wow, Nutmeg sure is sleeping a lot today!," she replied). We picked up Matthew, went to McDonalds for lunch, then to ToysRUs so they could spend some of the money they'd made at our yard sale. Yes, I was totally buttering them up without them knowing it.

Then we came home, and I sat them down in the livingroom, and told them that when I had woken up this morning, Nutmeg was dead. They cried, and wanted to see him, and cried and cried and cried some more. Later in the afternoon we took his body and all his stuff to Tessa's teacher's house, so she could take care of it all.

Tessa is still talking about Nutmeg, of course, at various intervals. Today she worried that we had given him carrots that were too large for him to eat, and had poisoned him somehow. I had to assure her again that nothing we did had made Nutmeg die. That he was just old, and tired, and had had a good life. And that he had died in his sleep, which is the best way to die, because he wasn't in any pain. That he had just gone to sleep, and never woke up, and would dream forever. We've been over this about a million times in the last week.

Tessa was doing a painting project the other day at her craft table, when she suddenly started singing:

"Nutmeg DIIIIIIIIED
While we were having him..."

I couldn't help it; I burst out laughing. The tragic operatic nature of her impromptu song was just too much for me. She got indignant, understandably, and told me that it was not funny, it was very serious. She has been wishing on every dandelion she finds that all animals and people would not die, but would live forever. It's a hard lesson for a barely five year old.

Nutmeg had acted a little strangely the day before he died. He didn't seem to want to eat, and he burrowed in his wood shavings. I think he knew he was dying, and he was preparing himself. When I went to put his towel over his cage that night, he had crawled under his food dispenser. I thought that was kind of odd. He looked up at me as I put the towel over his cage, as I said good night to him. He was still there in the morning, in the exact same position, and I knew as soon as I looked at him that he was dead. I prodded him anyway, and his little furry body was stiff and still.

I found myself really upset throughout the day, and not just for the kids. We'd had Nutmeg for the week around Thanksgiving vacation last year, and of course a pattern quickly was established in which I became the one who took care of him. He figured this out immediately, and I was the one he would squeak to first thing in the morning. The night before he died, I took him out of his cage and cleaned it, and then I petted his little head for awhile. He really was sweet. And as Tessa keeps saying, he was the closest thing we'd ever had to a pet.

After he died, I emptied out the water bottles I'd put into the freezer to keep him cool during the day, and I flashed on the memory of my mother coming home after my dad died, going to the refrigerator, and throwing away all the vegetables she'd bought to make veggie juice for him.

It's so hard being the nurturer, the mom, the one who takes care of others. It's the best thing in the world, of course, but it can be the hardest thing too, to be the one who puts the towel over the cage and sees the living guinea pig for the last time, and is the one who finds the body in the morning.

Rest in peace, Nutmeg.

Flying Through the Decades

I was born 40 years ago today.

I was born in San Fernando, the original Valley Girl, but was plucked from that hot spot (I used to protest when we went to visit my grandparents, "It's too hot in the Valley!" I remember my mother once replying, "But it's winter!," like that was relevant) and moved to Oxnard at the tender age of one. You know in the movie Sideways, how Paul Giamatti's character gets off the freeway in Oxnard to visit (and rob) his mother? That's the exit you get off to get to my mother's house, the house in which I grew up.

Here are my memories of my decade milestone birthdays:

On my 10th birthday, I went to the drive-in with some neighbors, to see Midway (lots of WWII movies in those days). I remember the mom chastising her son for being mean to me in some way by saying, "But Robert, it's her *birthday*!" A couple of days later, on the 4th of July, we had my family party. I had just turned 10, and America turned 200. I felt very grown up, very mature, to be in double digits.

On my 20th birthday, Ross had let himself be scheduled for a double shift at work (he was a clerk's helper, also known as a bagboy, at Lucky's in Santa Monica). I was pissed off. He was still really catering to my moods back in those days, and he felt really badly. He offered to take us out to dinner at the Bonaventure, and get us a room there, on the following day, *but that wasn't going to be my birthday*. I cried and carried on. He gave me a bunch of lovely clothes and I didn't even want to open them. We have these pictures of me as I finally opened the gifts, with my face all red from crying. Geez, I just want to slap myself. We did end up going to dinner the next day and it was very nice.

On my 30th birthday, we were in New Haven, CT. Ross was teaching in the Junior Statesman program at Yale for a month, and I tagged along because there was no way in hell I was going to be without him on my birthday. I had been absolutely obsessing about turning 30 for the whole year leading up to the day. How I was going to be 30, and I had nothing to show for my life. I didn't have a career (I had a job, but it wasn't the job I was meant to have), I didn't have a house, I didn't have a baby (we'd been trying for over three years and the continued failure had consumed my existence). I wasn't going to be young anymore. I was going to be old. I had been riding on cute for a long time, but how could I be cute at 30? But on that day in New Haven, as I was waiting for Ross to get out of his session, I struck up a conversation with some of the Junior Statesman high school students. I mentioned Ross, and said I was his wife, and one of the teenaged boys said, startled, "You're a wife? I thought you were a student in the program!" Okay, getting mistaken for a high school student on my 30th birthday was exactly what I needed. That was awesome.

And today is my 40th birthday. I still don't have a career (or even a job) or a house. I do have my babies though, my matched pair of miracles. I obsessed a bit about turning 40, but really, I'm too damned busy to worry too much about anything concerning myself. This morning I woke up (or rather, was woken up by Tessa running into our room) and thought, "Yeah, whatever."

Certainly there are things about myself and my life with which I'm less than satisfied, but the balance sheet looks pretty damn good. With all that I have, it is indeed a happy birthday.