The Second Automotive Miracle

I've had two events that I'm willing to call miracles (I wrote about the first one here). Here's how the second one went down.

Prima was 13, because this involved a trip to a city 45 minutes away to get her braces adjusted. Penny and Treya, 11 and 8, came along, because they knew that going to the orthodontist traditionally ended with a trip to the Barnes & Noble Starbucks. Normally.

We drove a six-year-old light blue Geo Prizm. It had been a little ragged lately, but the garage guys checked it out and said it looked fine about a week before. After the orthodontist, I stopped at a craft store, and it was a little cranky starting off, you know, it just seemed like it didn't want to get moving, but then it perked up and was fine. I told the girls we'd probably have to leave it at the garage overnight again.

Then, on the interstate on the way home, it really started sounding and feeling sort of wrong. I was worried, and pulled into the emergency lane and stopped. Again, it perked up and I said, Starbucks is off, girls, sorry, this thing is going straight to the garage. And I pulled out onto the highway. It's a good thing that I wasn't at speed, because about 200 meters down the road, the car just stopped completely.

The engine was still going just fine, but the car was not moving. And I was in the right lane. And I was just at the spot that the highway merged not just an on ramp, but an off ramp at the same spot. Everybody driving by on the highway did that doppler swerrrrrrrrrrrvvvvvvve-hooonnnnnnnnnnk around us at 80 mph giving us the finger. The day was bright and sunny, and nobody was going to see my blinker lights.

I was doing what I think of as "mama panicking," which is where you keep your voice very clear, very even, and very deliberate, as you race ahead panic-thinking what the hell you're going to do, because everything has just gotten very, very bad. "Hang on, just a second, be prepared to run together fast," I told them.

I ran through my options, none of them good.
1. I could get out and run in front of the car but if someone hit it, I'd be run over by my own car.
2. I could get out and run around the back, but I'd be squashed like a bug into my car.

It had been about twenty seconds since we'd stopped dead. I realized I'd have to dive into the passenger seat, grab them and get the hell over the on ramp lane and over the guard rails, but not over the part nearest to us, because that was a fifty foot drop off an overpass.

The very second I formulated this plan, the miracle started happening. First, a car pulled up on my right. A total dump of a car, a derelict, dirty, ratchet beater of a car—with two sketchy, grungy guys with long, dirty hair. The driver slowed and rolled his window down. "Hey, are you in trouble? Do you need help?"

And in less time than it takes to tell it, Hat Guy parked his car right there to block the on-ramp. NoHat Guy got my kids out of my car, across the highway ramp to safety behind the guardrail. Then they both ran to me in the Geo, and those guys pushed for all they were worth,

"Lady, get your foot off the brake—"
     "It's not on the brake!"

"Lady, take the emergency off—"
     "It's not on!"

"Lady, put the car in neutral—"
     "It is!"

"Lady—GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE CAR! GO, GO, GO!"

My two grungy angels made sure I was safe with the kids, apologized (apologized!) because they had to go since their own car was in danger, and whoosh, they were gone.

Now we weren't going to die, but we were probably going to cause someone else to die.

Just as I was frantically calling 911 to report that my car was going to cause a horrible accident, an eighteen-wheeler semi pulled up carefully behind my tiny car and stopped. He yelled across the ramp to us, "Are you ok there? I'll just stay here until the cops come, and keep my flashers on. People can see me better than your little car, there."

And the driver stayed until the state trooper came, and the state trooper stayed until AAA came and towed it to Northampton.

The guy at Firestone said that the Geo was totaled. The axle was just cracked through, and that there's nothing I could have done about it, and I couldn't have known it was about to break. The desk guy asked me what happened, and when I told him, he said, "Oh, that was your little blue car broken down a couple hours ago? I saw that on my way into work." And I said: "You saw us? You left me and my kids to die on the interstate while you drove to your job at an auto repair shop? Thanks so much—did you also give us the finger?"


So in the end, we're alive, and breathtakingly beyond lucky. There were no shortage of jerks on the road. But it profoundly doesn't matter. The only people that mattered were the two strangers in the beater car, who saved our lives, and the driver of the semi, who saved the lives of everybody else on that highway. I wonder sometimes if the three of them really realized what they did that bright autumn day. I think about them a lot, because they are who I want to be.

November. Just November.

I have never been much of a fan of November, poor month.

After the roaring gold and red beauty of October, November comes on cold, blech and dreary, with skeletonized trees, and murk. The routine is in place, there's a lot of generalized busy guilt about the impending holidays, and between leaving home before sunrise and returning after sunset, I feel like a clean coal miner. To reuse Douglas Adams' description of Sunday afternoons, November is the long, dark, teatime of the soul.

So this November, I'm going to finally do something I've always wanted to do, which is National Novel Writing Month. It'll mean going on a bit of a hiatus from this and my other blogs (Kindernerd and Cordelia Flakk), but I'll do some updates here and let you know how it all goes.

Lies I Told My Children

I am fine with a good lie. Little falsehoods are how we smooth out the bumps of being human, and the unvarnished "truth" is the hallmark of the passive-aggressive jerk and the sociopath. But there are rules. Like the Hippocratic oath, first, do no harm. You shouldn't get away with lying that would get you jail time in the outside world. And keep it simple, because the more byzantine you get, the harder it is to uphold. From a skills perspective, remember Emily Dickinson's advice, "tell the truth, but tell it slant." In terms of fallout, don't be a weasel: own up to your lies. Be ready with a reasonable rationale. However, for parents, there really isn't a statute of limitations, so you can be a weasel for a while, as long as you out yourself good-naturedly in good time. I fessed up to the following about six years after it takes place.

The biggest lie I told my children was the now infamous "Grocery Store Lie." This lasted half a decade, until it was destroyed accidentally, and was of no use any more. The Grocery Store Lie was a defensive lie, as the shopping experience is one where the weight of all the power of the marketing industry burdens the tiny shoulders of your child, and you are responsible for somehow relieving them.

Prima was a bright, intelligent child, an advertiser's dream, and she was captivated by the omnipresent, attractive candy that rises like bonbon shrubbery tunnelling the checkout counter at the grocery store. It is cunningly and deliberately placed within the arm reach of the average-sized two-year-old. I didn't forbid sweets, but there was a time and a place, and it was not going to be a debate every trip to the store.

My first defense against the checkout was the salad bar. After getting groceries as quickly as humanly possible, I'd wheel up to the salad bar, get tiny containers that are meant for salad dressing, and Prima and I, and later Penny, would carefully discuss and choose grapes, blueberries, small chunks of melons and so on, for a "special snack."

When we reached the checkout gauntlet, I didn't avoid the candy or try to look the other way. To the contrary, we took our time. Everything there must be for decoration. And wasn't it all beautiful? Bright colors, interesting shapes, and big-print words. How lovely it was of the store to dress up the register with all these pretty things! Gosh, how many colors could we name? Tons!

Smart cashiers enjoyed this exchange. Dim ones, the ones who tried to correct my obvious mistake, I talked over. Here's your special snack! Remember which one is yours? Right! The one with five blueberries! Let's count them: one, two, three, four, five!

This one-act play ran at our local grocery theater every week for five whole years. Until my sister came to visit. Auntie Eyeball (a story for another time) took my oldest with her into the store while I waited with the little ones in the car. And lo, it came to pass, that grocery paradise was lost. "Mama! I got decorations! It's real candy! Auntie Eyeball bought me candy at the store! If you ask them, they'll sell it to you and you can buy it!" Prima shrieked while she danced the parking lot dance of a kindergartner hopped up on M&Ms. Penny and baby Treya howled in excitement. My sister looked like she had just had a revelation, too late, too late.

The only thing left to do was my final performance, the one where I exclaimed, "Oh. My. God. That's absolutely incredible! They let you buy the decorations? That's the most amazing thing I have ever heard! I cannot believe it!" Then I turned to my sister and shouted, "This Changes Everything!"

Jack & Oscar

I am not much of a fishtank person. I think if you have to have them at all, they should be in a medical waiting room, because they are the pet equivalent of the Care Channel, the hospital tv station where you literally watch the grass grow. Fish swim around, the tank gives off blue light and a gentle bubbling sound, and all I want to do is read old magazines and yawn. Besides the lack of real interaction, my biggest problem with pet fish is the complete lack of personality, with one exception.

In college, I lived in an off-campus room. This was one of those highly illegal setups where the landlord barely kept up a mouse-ridden aging four bedroom big old house, but also walled off the dining room and rented out the attic. Because legally only three unrelated people could be on the lease, the other six of us technically subletted from them. Two of the people on the lease were Shelly and Mike. Shelly had a fifty gallon aquarium in the common room. I did not much like Shelly. She was cranky and bossy, and abused her position on the lease to treat the rest of us like her minions.

When we moved in, there were two fish in her tank that she had imaginatively named Oscar (who was an oscar fish), and Jack (who was a jack fish). A year before, there had been twelve small fish in a beautifully kept tank, lovingly fed and adored. Then one day there there were eleven, and Oscar was a little bit fatter. Then like a dismal children's book, there were ten, nine and then eight increasingly paranoid fish. As their number diminished, Oscar noticeably expanded. Then one day, in the expanse of gravel and glass, there was just Oscar and just Jack.

Jack's life was a Kafka-esque nightmare. For some crime or mistaken identity in a past life, he was serving a life sentence in a fifty gallon see-through prison with a stone-cold, homicidal psychopath. He was condemned to swim furiously around the giant, desolate tank twenty-four hours a day, trying to avoid getting cannibalized by the malevolent, predatory Oscar. Like a Roman coliseum audience, we witnessed the quiet but desperate fish drama every time we were in the living room. Even with this traumatic history, though, the ultimate takeaway was that the living room had a big tank with two fish swimming around in it.

Then one day, doing his chores from the house list, my boyfriend may have knocked the aquarium pump plug out of the wall when he plugged in the vacuum, although he was certain that he did not. Most likely the pump simply have failed. Whatever it was, Shelly went ballistic, with screaming accusations of deliberate piscicide. Apparently the overweight stalker depended on the pump more than the fit athlete. The reign of terror had ended. Shelly was howling. Oscar was dead.

Jack, however, was alive, more alive than he had ever been in his whole life. And this is where there exception to fish being mostly floating decor, because within days, Jack developed an observable, quantifiable personality. He stopped his frantic marathon swimming and began to leisurely enjoy hanging out in different areas of the tank. But more extraordinary, Jack took up a hobby: renovation.

Every time you came into the room, the look of the aquarium had completely changed. Small hills would appear in the blue gravel terrain at the front of the tank. The next morning, the front was flat but a promontory had risen in the back left corner. The castle was buttressed, then regraded. Grabbing little mouthfuls of stones, Jack sculpted the eden that had so unexpectedly appeared out of his personal hell. If work is love made visible, Jack was a fish in love.

I can't claim that Jack represents entire genus. I've never observed another fish with much interesting going on, certainly not enough to justify keeping a tank full of them in the house. And Jack was pretty boring before his liberation. But afterward? He was fascinating. He will always be my second thought. Fish really don't have much character. Except Jack.

The First Automotive Miracle

I am watched over by Saints Click and Clack. The two experiences I can identify as miracles were both automotive.

Every parent with young children and a dodgy car tends a flourishing garden of mental dread at all times: a certainty that something deeply awful will happen to them in that vehicle. We had $1,000. We could throw that at the five thousand needed to fix the dead old Ford Taurus in the driveway. Or we could try to find something for $1,000 that at least ran. We found a very big, very old blue van, and we were always one tiny decrepit auto part away from catastrophe.

The kids were ages five, three and less-than-a-year old. The house was two years old. I had named the house Entropy North, and described it as "do-it-yourself Habitat for Humanity."

Although this seems unrelated—bear with me—a story about a local high school appeared on the front page of our little town newspaper. The gymnasium was finally getting renovated. I was at the construction site first thing in the morning, asking for the old gym flooring.

A lot of my house is reclaimed materials. I had my eye out for this kind of thing all the time. But something weird happens with wood flooring. When it's installed, it's necessary and desirable. While it's in the state of disrepair, or being torn out, or tossed in the dumpster, it's worthless debris. But if it has been lifted from the dumpster, even if nothing has been done to it, just that experience of resurrection transforms the wood into an antique, and it is priced accordingly. So if you have absolutely no money, and you want wood flooring, you need to be getting at it when it is in that middle limbo of needing to be tossed away and actually being tossed away, but before anybody else thinks of wanting it. And that's how we ended up with crowbars, prying out the free-throw zone every morning before six and every evening after five for a week. We had company: the Cuban American club had the exact same thought, but there was plenty to go around. And it's nice to think we have twin floors with them now.

Because this was a big project, we had borrowed an extra car so that we could tag-team. Because I had just unloaded a ton of flooring, the van was empty. Because I had paid the babysitter, I had my checkbook. Because the flooring was free, I had about $100 in my bank account. I loaded the kids into the van and went to pick up their father.

At a giant four-way stoplight by the mall, at ten o'clock at night, my nightmare began. The van just died. No engine, no electrical. The key went click and then nothing. Tots and baby slept in the back seat. The car blocked the lane, the mall was closed, no pay phones, long before most people had cell phones. It was very dark. Summer, so bus service had ended, although there was still plenty of fast traffic. I sat as the light changed through once, twice, wondering what on earth I was going to do. Getting the kids out and across the intersection was going to be incredibly dangerous. Then someone pulled up next to the passenger side and honked. Of course drivers were going to be pissed off at me, my car was blocking everything.

But good grief, it was a tow-truck. "Need help, lady?" The tow guy told me he could tow me right here, right now, as long as I could give him a check. One problem completely solved from out of the blue. I asked how all of us would fit in the cab of the truck. We couldn't, he already had someone with him. He had room for one. This was absurd: my five year old? Three year old? Baby? I guess we'd be walking in the dark for a while.

I had barely gotten my mind around this when I heard a little beep. In the dark, a car had pulled up close to me in the oncoming lane on the driver side. Windows rolled down, "Hi, are you guys ok?" And there was a family from church. The rest goes like the end of a nursery rhyme: the van got towed, the tow guy got paid, the friends got thanked, the kids and I got a safe ride home, and, in the borrowed car, picked up their father about a half-hour later.

Nightmares depend on certainty about the uncertain. You get crazy because you're so sure that the worst case scenario will be awful. But lots of times, situations you actually control become a train wreck, and complete chaos turns out to be fluffy at the bottom.

A Drove of Rabbits; or Christian Charity, goddamnit

Part the First

Like Alice in Wonderland, it definitely started with a white rabbit. Prima was three, and had met a rabbit at some event or other, and I thought, what the heck and we took him in. Prima told us his name was WindowCottonowie in that insulting tone of voice toddlers have, as if we have let down the side on a very basic matter of etiquette. WindowCottonowie ate the overload of kale from our farm share, kept the chickens company, and contributed to the compost while he lived, and the soil in the field when he snuffed his last snuffle. A sweet and fond chapter in our book of pets.

Prima and Madison were best friends at church. When they were about 8 or 9, Madison went a little bunny-crazy. Her mom, Kristin, had met a lady, Patricia, at church who happened to be a rabbit breeder. I had nothing to do with any of this until Kristin introduced Patricia to me with a bit of a request. Patricia had just gotten a job a couple of hours away and was having trouble figuring out how to best move her breeding rabbits. She had twenty-two. Since my yard was a field, maybe if Kristin took eleven hutches and I took eleven hutches, Patricia could provide food. Then she'd have about six weeks to get herself settled and pick up the rabbits. Prima and Madison hopped up and down, so happy, please, oh please, oh please oh please, BUNNIES!

A week later, Kristin stayed with the kids while Clark, Doug and I went to pick up the rabbits. Patricia greeted us, and the first thing I noticed was that she was really, really relaxed, and that there didn't seem to be any signs of packing up around the place. That turned out to be an easy explanation, it was because she had not prepared in any way whatsoever for us to pick up the rabbits. Oh, and there weren't actually twenty-two rabbits, she merrily informed us. She "always lied about the numbers, because you know how people get." There were a lot, but she wasn't totally sure how many, because many of them were only visitors to their opened cages. And you'd only be a visitor, too, if your hutch looked like the toilet scene from Trainspotting. She did have a fairly accurate count of the ones in the derelict car in the driveway. And the ones living in the bathtub in the house. Everything was chaotic and filthy. Whatever veneer of functionality she had possessed at church was gone. We were suddenly on a tour of a woman's untethered inner psyche. Patricia was not a breeder. She was, in the graceful euphemism animal shelters use, a rabbit "collector." We got to work, although maybe we should have just run away, because it now felt like an episode of Animal Cops on Animal Planet.

I say we got to work, but in fact, only Clark, Doug and I got to work. Patricia held up the dirty cages helplessly, saying she had no idea how to proceed. She caught runaway rabbits, then put them back down on the ground. She opened cages that contained rabbits and took them out, cautioning them not to run away. They were not good listeners. Those of us that retained all our marbles ran around shaking rabbit poo and bedding out of cages, looking for water bottles, packing up rabbits and putting them into the van and the pickup. After Patricia attempted to liberate all of the packed rabbits, one of us had to be stationed guarding the vehicles at all times. At sundown, our pickup full, Clark and I finally left as Doug chased a black bunny into the woods in the dusk. Doug and Kristen ended up with eleven animals. Good thing we have a big field: Clark and I had fifty-eight. At the moment. Some of them were pregnant.

Part the Second

The rabbits were in tough shape. A male angora was a five-pound matt of of unkempt hair with ear damage from fighting. Patricia told us back at the house that this was one of her favorite rabbits, "because he was hurt." But of course, she had made sure he was hurt by caging him with other males, so there was a Munchausen-by-proxy thing going on as well. All the rabbits were inbred. I told Patricia that I would be getting new owners for as many of them as possible.

I frantically made crates out of anything I could find. It took forever. You don't want rabbits sharing a hutch. For all that they are a symbol of gentleness and softness, male rabbits do fight and inflict a lot of damage on each other. Females with males will do exactly what rabbits are so famous for doing. Females together are ok, but it's incredibly hard to be really certain you've accurately identified their gender. And if you're wrong, you have injuries or dear god, more rabbits.

For all their prolific breeding, rabbits are terrible mothers, at least the first time around. On the one hand, it was kind of good news that we weren't ending up with the total number that were born, but on the other hand, it was depressing to go out first thing in the morning and have to deal with cleaning out a cage of tiny newborns that the mom kicked to death. My kids certainly got an education in the miracle of birth and the inevitability of death.

Patricia dropped in. She let about twenty rabbits out and dug holes in my yard to make a rabbit amusement park. I started locking the gate. Then, amidst the hutch building and the long list of animal rescue places I was calling, she simply disappeared completely. Kristin could not locate her. She stopped paying for rabbit food. After some impressive Nancy Drew work, Kristin found her in a Boston homeless shelter. There was no job, there was no apartment, nothing. Patricia had just been evicted for her animal hoarding. I asked Kristin to let her know that the final date stood: whatever rabbits I couldn't place, went away on tax day.

I tried to give them away. Everybody has a story of unwisely giving or getting bunnies on Easter, right? Sorry, rural myth, and believe me I tried. No one wanted these animals. Not with bows on, not in baskets. Not the local shelter. Not the rescue groups. Not the pet store. No amount of advertising could unload them. No one wanted them. Finally I located a woman, a llama farmer, who agreed to take fifteen off my hands. And a lady down the street happened to see all the rabbits as she took a walk, and took away the healed, cleaned-up angora. But mostly, nobody wanted them, and while I was fine with keeping one or even two, we were now up to sixty-eight.

As April 15 approached, I was grappling with what their fate would be. Mention you have rabbits, and people will say oh, how cute. Mention that you have sixty eight, and people start hauling out their recipe books. I could eat them. I have eaten rabbit, but it's not my favorite, and the animals were not, shall we say, of high quality, and honestly, although I could see times in my life where this was a good option, at this point, I was just not hungry enough. I could euthanize them. Sad, and such a waste, and I wasn't entirely sure of my ability to reenact Old Yeller/Sweeney Todd almost seventy times. Or I could, in a highly illegal act, drive them to a state park and let them take their chances as nature's McNuggets. I couldn't decide what, if any, was the ethical move.

Then I got a call from Kristin. Patricia had shown up at her house early in the day of April fourteenth with a UHaul and a guy she found at the homeless shelter. They took hours loading up the rabbits, including taking one of Madison's out of spite. They racked up long-distance calls on Kristin's phone, trashed the entire yard and managed to get some cash out of Doug, who wanted them gone, and was sympathetic to the guy who was pretty annoyed to miss curfew back at the shelter.

On the fifteenth of April, Patricia arrived at my house with the UHaul. I was prepared, though. I sent the kids to my sister's house. I hid Prima's two rabbits in the crawl space. I put the stereo speakers in the windows, and then cranked tunes so I wouldn't have to deal with her craziness. As she arrived, Clark and I went outside in gloves and crappy clothes, locking the house doors. Then we hauled those sixty eight rabbits out of the yard. I got the bright idea of stacking the cages behind the tires of the truck so that she would have to move them if she wanted to leave. And we worked fast, intervening when Patricia tried to let the animals out of their cages to run around. Then we slammed the truck door, put Patricia into the driver's seat, said, "Bye now," and that was, at last, the end of it.

Epilogue

Enough time has passed that Kristin and I laugh about how doing a favor for an acquaintance morphed into enabling someone completely nuts. I still like to help people out, although I do try to get more details first. About a year after, we were talking about the whole ordeal, and a clergy member at our church interrupted us. "This is about rabbits, right? And was the woman named Patricia?" Yes, and yes. Well, it turned out that the diocese had a system-wide alert out on the rabbit lady, because she liked to hand out brown lunch bags containing rabbits to Sunday school children. There was no way to communicate her riskiness to the parish, because it would violate her privacy. Which I get, theoretically, but it was sad that there was no real way to actually help her, or the animals. When clergy, social workers, SPCA or town animal control got too close, Patricia just took off and moved. Before ending up at our church, she had shown up at a little one about a half hour north of us with a truck full of, anybody want to guess? She left it, locked, in the church parking lot, in the baking July heat. The staff had to break open the truck doors to give the animals water. I don't have the answers. Last I saw of them, Patricia and the bunnies were on their way to some poor sucker's place outside Boston. Someone she met at church.

Pogo & Pepper

The first dog I was ever aware of was Pogo. I remember him as a mashup of primeval lore plus every beagle I've ever met, so I knew him metaphorically rather than personally. Pogo was from a litter of Lucky, who lived across the street. Lucky, I did know, because she was my best friend's dog, and because she was a plump homebody, content to dig herself a nice dirt nest under the front shrubs of her house, and stay put.

Pogo, on the other hand, was plucky and active, and in the end, a heartbreaker. My brother had a thirteen-year-old's reasonable expectation of a dog that would be his buddy, hanging out, riding the paper route, playing catch, chewing the occasional bone. My brother named him after his favorite comic strip.
And at first, Pogo seemed to be on board with the plan. He ate a couple meals, checked out the scene, slept in his bed, got scratched behind the ears. Then came The Smell.

It was mysterious.

Maybe it was leprechaun's corned beef drag lure. Maybe there was a bowl at rainbow's end filled with infinite biscuits, or maybe a place in an ancient Roman fox hunt. Maybe it was unicorn pee. Whatever it was, Pogo surrendered completely. Nose to the ground, he vacuumed the yard, and then, like the last notes of a sad ballad, he was gone.

We were never going to get another dog after Pogo. It was too painful, and you never knew if you were putting all that love into a four-foot drifter. No dogs.

My parents were children of the Great Depression. This led to some interestingly distorted shopping legacies, including driving past Stop & Shop, Big Y supermarket and Price Chopper every week to go to the Meat Store miles away in Springfield. Even during the gas crisis of the seventies.
And once, at the Meat Store, after we parked and got out of the car, something ran under it. A little dog with curly hair and a diamond collar. A really, really rich dog. No, my sister said, it's not real diamonds, that would be stupid, it's a dog. He was terrified. He refused to come out from under the car. Until my dad took out the baloney.

We put a lost and found ad in the paper. We were only keeping the dog until the owner claimed him. He was very little and cute and fluffy. His fur seemed well-brushed so we were pretty sure someone would want him back. He was about five years old, and a mixed breed, alternately hilarious and embarrassing to my elementary school self: a cockapoo. His black eyes were bright, and he kissed us all the time. He couldn't get enough of us. We made him a little bed in the garage. But he was just a houseguest. We waited, afraid to get attached. A week later someone called, and I sat on the bottom stair, biting my nails until they turned out to be missing a white dog. And then the days and weeks went by, and although we were never, ever, ever getting another dog, for the next twenty-one years we had a temporary canine lodger.

Finders keepers. I like to think the losers weren't weepers. I like to think they ended up with a vagabond beagle.