Domestic Vignettes
I am accustomed to stress and fear. Between 20 years of ER work and a devotion to adventurous hobbies I have a good deal of experience with being terrified and generally feel fairly confident in my ability to stay calm and just work through things one step at a time. That being said, no one properly prepared me for the existential terror of riding in the back of a car while my 15 year old daughter learned how to enter and exit interstates during driver’s education. Looking over blond pigtails at 65 mph from the back seat forced me to explore the confidence that I have in my daughter in a direct and tangible way. Generally when I am scared, I am working rapidly to do something about the situation. Being terrified while strapped into a back seat is very different. The driving instructor was an older woman, with heavy makeup, strong perfume, and nerves that would put a polar bear jockey to shame. After some deep breaths and some frantic texts to friends to let them know that I’ve always loved them, I settled down a bit and realized that I do trust my daughter. She’s smart, careful and has reflexes that occasionally impress our cat.
teenage daughters are just giant housecats
It reminded me of a time when I was 18 years old and had taken a job as a whitewater guide on the New River in West Virginia. I had been working there several months when my parents came to visit and to take a ride down the river with me. I took them out in a small raft, with me in the back and the two of them at the front. In the middle of the largest and longest rapid on the river I looked up to see my father swallowed by a large wave coming over the front of the boat, pulling him into the river, leaving only my mother and I to paddle. “Keep paddling hard for the eddy on the left!” I called to my mother, knowing that my father would end up there where we could retrieve him. I had swam this rapid myself and felt confident about things, and indeed, it worked out fine. Later that evening my mother was describing the strange tension of feeling torn between trying to rescue her husband and listen to her son telling her to keep paddling. It was an important moment for both of us. I did know what I was doing and she was able to trust me to do it. I’m not sure my father had the same experience, but he did prove that he was still a very capable swimmer when properly motivated.
standard operating procedures
I was getting out of my car in the driveway when my aunt Lois cruised by with her cane. A former marathon, runner, Lois still clocks a pretty competitive time to the mailbox and back from her porch. For having some struggles with short term memory, she does pretty well on her own in the small house next to us. But, sometimes, her days include activities that are hard to decipher. For example, she uses a children’s play broom to sweep the leaves out of the gutters on the street, a Sisyphean task at the bottom of a hill next to a national forest. I asked her where she was headed because it seemed late in the day for her mailbox run and she energetically told me, “I got to thinking about how one time there was a jacket in the mailbox and then I couldn’t remember what happened to that jacket so I decided to see if there was a jacket in the mailbox right now,” and headed on up toward the street. It made enough sense and she said it so confidently that it didn’t really catch up to me until I started up the steps that it didn’t make any sense at all. But then again she seemed like she was accomplishing something that was satisfying to her and wasn’t causing any trouble.
My only addition to decorating this year
Our family, with the exception of Stella, takes a pretty haphazard approach to Christmas. While Stella prepares a list of people and gifts in early November and completes it by Thanksgiving, the rest of us mostly blunder through it and hope our friends and family still like us by new years. This year, I sent Jude over to Lois’s house next door to see what she wanted for Christmas and learned never to mistake the elderly for predictable. And as much as Lois deserves whatever she wants for Christmas, I have decided not to buy the military night vision goggles that she requested. A good friend suggested getting her some cheaper VR goggles instead and just telling her that Asheville nightlife was even weirder than she’d imagined. But I have made a point to replace the batteries in her flashlight at the very least.
This year we stayed in town for Christmas. My parents joined us from Indiana and we spent a few days eating, playing games, sitting around reading books, and listening to every type of god awful, saccharine, worn-out, Christmas songs that Spotify could summon from its evil repository of seasonally infectious melodies. I can only assume that in many musician’s careers there must be a moment where they have to choose between making a Christmas album and starving. I wish more of them starved.
As a kid, I learned from my parents that each of us, every single day, has a sacred duty to “get some exercise”. This has served me well and my family likes me better when I am tired. But I also suspect that most Christmases don’t involve most of the family taking an hour to go exercise in the basement. While I gave tribute to saint Rebecca of the Peloton, my parents stretched, did some calisthenics, and managed to break a few of Tiffany’s therabands with their raw geriatric power.
Sometimes, being the only light sleeper in the household gives me access to nocturnal mysteries that are unwitnessed by those who sleep soundly. Several nights ago during a house rattling thunderstorm I was lying awake listening to the long, loud rolling thunder and shaking window panes when I heard a noise that I didn’t recognize. A long low rasping sound; what I would describe as a tiny death rattle. And it seemed to be moving closer to my bedroom with each iteration. It was cold and I did not want to get out from under the covers, but the combination of curiosity and middle-of-the-night heebie jeebies forced the issue. I walked out of the bedroom to find our cat sitting next to a large bullfrog, both of them looking at me as if I had interrupted. Our cat isn’t much of a hunter but occasionally brings a critter in through the cat door. I haven’t determined if his motives are generally hospitable or homicidal, which is a common conundrum when living with a tiny apex predator. Regardless, the frog let out another slow raspy soliloquy and the cat seemed proud of his new friend’s talents. It was not a mystery that I had the energy to further investigate, so I wrangled the frog into a large mason jar and sent him back into the forest before returning to bed.