Category: the everyday

Missing the bus

I can understand missing the bus on a normal morning, but on a morning with a two-hour delay?

For the last year or so, I have selfishly reserved the mornings for sitting at my desk and scribbling on endless yellow pad pages that I then carefully file away into manila folders and never look at again. To facilitate this vital writerly activity, I leave it to Amy to get the kids onto the school bus. Then, I take care of the afternoon pickups.

When Amy is running the morning departure, it seems to go like clockwork. I suppose it is a combination of familiarity and experience on her part and the ever-more-successful efforts of the local school to break the children’s spirits and mold them into good factory workers, including a willingness to live according to the dictates of the clock and lunch bell. At any rate, there is hardly ever any screaming—at least none that penetrates my Mack’s Pillow Soft Silicone Putty Earplugs.

Sometimes the morning kid/bus routine falls to me, however—such as when Amy has to leave early for an inspection site on the other side of the state, for example, or when there is a weather-related delayed opening. Considering that this latter circumstance arises approximately every other day January-March, you’d think I’d develop something of a routine myself, but it inevitably unfolds as a bit of a shit show.

Basically I just continue hiding in my office as long as possible, letting them vegetate in front of the TV, thinking it will be the work of just a few minutes to get them bundled out and shove them out the door, but of course it always takes longer than expected to snap them out of their YouTube trances and get them started on finding, donning, and tying shoes, figuring out what weight of jacket is needed, brushing their teeth, running combs across their heads (this last is preceded by a ten-minute argument on good days, so it often falls by the wayside, and I’m always waiting for a knock on the door from CPS in response to a report that the children have been sent to school with matted hair), find and stuff errant papers into backpacks, and so forth.

So it often happens that, in the midst of all of this, I’ll catch sight of the clock and decide that, this time, I really have waited too long and we will be lucky to make the bus, if in fact we aren’t already missing it at that very second.

“Go, run to the corner,” I’ll snap at Axl, figuring if he can just round the neighbor’s big hedge in time the bus driver will see him and wait, giving me time to finish tying Belle’s shoes, scoop her up, and bring up the rear at a run. In fact, it has only ever happened once or twice that we haven’t reached the bus stop before the bus, and even then we had plenty of time as the dozen or so kids who leave from our stop made their shambling way up the three steps and back to their various assigned seats, but that doesn’t prevent me from experiencing these panics nonetheless.

Then came this particular morning: a two-hour delayed opening, not because of weather this time, but rather to allow time for a “faculty senate” meeting (mental picture of the children’s teachers in long black occult robes with multicolored sashes in amphitheater seating, regarding the superintendent in his toga and crown of laurels).

We had already reached the point of my panic, Axl had been sent out the door, Belle was on the threshold, one foot raised to start down the steps—when, no, the jacket she was wearing wouldn’t do. She must have the leopard-print fleece thing she recently received as a birthday present. Exasperated but also a soft touch, I hesitated, then dashed upstairs to where I thought I’d noticed it hanging in Belle’s room, but no luck. I tore through the rest of the house, scanning chair backs and other likely dumping spots. Still no luck. I quailed—would Belle accept this, would I be in for slinging her over my shoulder, screaming, and racing her to the bus stop?

“I don’t know where it is, and if you don’t leave now you will miss the bus,” I said to Belle when I returned to the mud room. Something in my tone seemed to reach through the usual stubbornness, and she assented and turned to go. I leaned out of the backdoor and called after her.

“You’d better just run,” I called, half suspecting I was exaggerating.

“O-tay,” she said, solemnly, and broke into a plodding trot, weighed down by her winter coat and boots and a backpack larger than her torso.

“But still look both ways!” I called as she reached the side walk.

“O-tay!” she called back.

I watched until she rounded the hedgerow corner, then went back inside, looked at the clock. Later than ever before—she couldn’t have made it. I rushed back outside and hurried to the hedgerow corner. There was the bus, and Belle—still running—rounding the front, the white blob of the driver’s head behind the tinted window inclined down toward her.

Later, I would learn that she had, to all intents and purposes, missed the bus. That around the time I’d been shooing her out the door, the last of the line of children already waiting at the stop had filed aboard. The driver had looked in his large mirror to be sure everyone was seated and was preparing to set out for the next stop—ready to retract the stop sign that flips out from the side of the bus and put the vehicle in gear—when Axl rose from his seat and rushed forward.

“My sister isn’t here yet,” everyone agreed later that he had said. Then, spying her rounding the hedge, he had pointed. “There she is!”

Later, I would be unsure which part of the morning’s hectic dance had turned out to be more beautiful. Axl’s expression of custodial big-brotherly care—the least one can hope for, that, for all their differences and conflicts, your children will simply look out for each other—you don’t let the bus leave without your sister.

Or Belle, dwindling in the distance, that enormous backpack bouncing up and down, running because I said she needed to and she believed me. Trying her best to catch the bus.

The moments this life runs on. The moments when it seems possible to believe maybe we are getting some things right.

The Paratrooper and the Bleach Stain

ELKINS, a Thursday—I had a bone to pick with the Paratrooper.

On a recent business trip, I had as usual tried to make up for the unruly beard and piercings by overdressing slightly—and, I dare say, snazzily: my favorite slim fit Combat Gentlemen dress shirt, pink tie, and light v-neck sweater holding it all together.

But on taking off the sweater that evening in my AirBnb, I had chanced to notice in a mirror that the back of the right sleeve of my shirt was marred by a bleach—not stain, I guess, but in a way the opposite of a stain.

It had to have happened at the Paratrooper’s shop. At home, we never use bleach with laundry, and for that matter I don’t think I’ve ever even washed this shirt myself, preferring always to get it professionally laundered and pressed immediately after returning from the business trips that are my only occasion for dressing up these days. Something reassuring about the crisp, plastic-cased shirt hanging ready in the closet, just in case.

So after lunch I tucked the shirt under my arm and set out on foot toward the southern edge of town, the ugly stretch of road where lie our one grocery store, one of our two car washes, the newly redone McDonald’s, the defunct computer-repair shop, and the Paratrooper’s place of business.

But what was my plan, anyway? Did I think the Paratrooper was going to buy me a new shirt? Did I want him to? There was an argument that this would simply be what I was owed, but as I walked I found I didn’t really picture that happening and especially didn’t picture myself forcing the issue. The walk, along busy Randolph Avenue, soothed by the whoosh of passing log trucks and oilfield services vehicles, seemed to calm me and put thoughts of confrontation out of my mind.

“Hey, Sutton!” the Paratrooper called as he emerged from the racks of hanging clothes in the back of the shop. “Sorry for keeping you waiting!”

I spread the shirt on the counter, and he started writing it up as a normal drop-off. I almost hated to bring up the problem—and when I did, he at first took me to be consulting with him as a neutral professional in the clothes-tending business, missing the accusation I was trying to make.

“Well, you got two choices,” he said. “Keep it covered up”—I had already mentioned that I almost always wore it under a sweater or jacket, as an explanation of why I really couldn’t be sure when it had happened—“or you could alter it into a short sleeve shirt.”

“No, I mean, I think it happened here,” I finally broke it to him.

He reacted with muted disbelief.

“Usually the girls are real good about telling me when something happens,” he murmured. “Well…”

He seemed at a loss. I discovered that my heart wasn’t in taking any sort of hard line.

“How about a free wash and press and we call it even?” I asked.

“Works for me!” he said. “How much starch you want?”

As he wrote up the ticket—by hand, on the same sort of little carbon receipt pad I used when I worked at the record store during high school in the early 1990s—he asked how my father was doing.

“I always liked chatting with him,” he said.

From here we got onto the subject of health, and suddenly he was rattling off a list of injuries that was only startling until I remembered that he is, after all, the Paratrooper: “I’ve had both knees replaced, been shot, stabbed, got my nose broken four times, broke my ankles more times than I can count.”

This last, of course, was down to his Vietnam-era practice of jumping out of perfectly good airplanes.

“How many times did you jump, roughly?” I said, wondering if he would even know.

“359,” he answered.

Of course he would know.

“What’s a high career number, you know, for someone who stayed in a long time?” I asked.

“The colonel had something like 5,000 under his belt when I was serving,” he said. “He did every single training jump so he racked them up.”

Then the Paratrooper told a story about when the colonel had had a “total malfunction,” i.e., both his primary and his reserve chutes failing to open on a training jump. If I understood correctly, this colonel had been able to sort of body surf through the air and divert himself from falling toward the hard open field where everyone normally came down to instead land in a marshy area nearby.

“He broke both legs but he survived,” said the Paratrooper.

“What’s the lowest you can open a chute and still make it down safely?” I asked. He didn’t exactly answer that question but told me that, when he was jumping, they were equipped with an altimeter-based device that would release their chutes automatically at 3,500 feet, “in case you passed out or got shot or something.”

The bell on the door jingled as a woman entered and I stepped back to let her approach the counter, but the Paratrooper wasn’t done talking parachuting.

“We had these two guys who were always racing to be first to the ground.”

This sounded like a race you wouldn’t want to win.

“Trouble was, one of them weighed 150 and the other was about 245. That little guy tried every trick in the book but he never won. I told him, he’s got 90 pounds on you, you’re basically just giving them cases of beer away. But he wouldn’t listen.”

I wasn’t so sure, some vague memory of physics class and everything falling at the same rate of speed flickering awake in a recess of my mind. (Later, looking it up, I learned it’s more complicated than that.)

“Well, I’ll let you get to your next customer here,” I said. The woman who’d come in was waiting patiently by the door.

“I’m just here to pick up Girl Scout cookies,” she said, indicating the low table by the counter stacked with boxes of Tagalongs, Samoas, Do-Si-Dos, and gluten-free Trios.

The Paratrooper tore my ticket off his pad and handed it over. “Have a good day, Sutton!” he said cheerfully.

I returned the sentiment and turned to go.

The door closed behind me. The bell rang. I turned left, and started walking home.

Sardines, Kettlebells, and My Aching Thumb

ELKINS, a Wednesday—“Up 0450. First awake 0400, T/T.”

So reads the only entry I made on today’s page in the Moleskine daily planner I use as my logbook. (“T/T” = tossed and turned.)

That solitary entry says something about the day, and how it has ended with my guts burning with what I have independently diagnosed as pent up words. I was so excited about this blog, the blog I am starting, have started by posting a solitary Walt Whitman quote—and am now so flooded and overwhelmed by the possibilities that I can’t seem to get started on any of them.

This is how it always happens. I have only to start to see the shape or possible shape of a new project, a new direction to try to direct my writing toward, before it begins to inflate and grow wildly, absurdly, possible topics and refinements of the project spilling over and filling the horizon, until what felt like a long but clear path toward a far-off solitary peak becomes a trackless wilderness approaching a wall of mountains.

Nothing for it but to knuckle through.

Speaking of knuckling through things, I’ve skipped my kettlebell exercises these last few days. While in Ohio at the end of last week, I started experiencing a pain in my left thumb. Hurt when I squeezed it, hurt when I bent it, and it sure as hell hurt when I tried to use it in my usual grip for both goblet squats and Turkish getups.

And wouldn’t you know Sunday is the one-day StrongFirst Kettlebell Course in Alexandria? Two hundred dollars, no refunds, and now this pesky thumb calls into question whether I’ll really be able to participate. The whole rationale for dropping this kind of money had been that, if I’m going to keep doing kettlebells for years and years, some periodic outlay to check form and refine technique wold be worth it to avoid some kind of injury. Now here is some kind of injury that threatens to keep me from going at all.

When the pain was still lingering at the beginning of this week, I did the first thing one does in these sorts of situations: I wasted money in hopes there would be an easy, effortless answer. More specifically, I went to CVS and wasted $12 on a shitty, generic wrist/thumb brace that wouldn’t turn out to do anything except irritate the sore spot on my thumb more. On the cover of the box it showed a woman’s hand clad in the brace, holding a smart phone, her braced thumb in scrolling position. I had the thought that if the brace would actually allow one to operate one’s phone it couldn’t be doing much bracing but bought it anyway.

Standing in the aisle, considering the choices, I found myself unsure whether I needed a medium or a large. I carried one of each over to the pharmacy prescription drop-off window, ten feet away.

“Can I open this and try it on?” I asked the woman standing there, resplendent in her white lab coat. I pointed out that the box wasn’t sealed with glue or tape, so it wouldn’t do any damage.

She hesitated, her mind clearly racing.

“I have a tape measure back here, you could measure your hand,” she offered, after a pause.

I stared at her. Did the woman really think I didn’t know the circumference of my own hand—did the phrase like the back of my hand have no currency here?

“See here,” I imagined saying, “what matters is not how big my hand is, what matters is how true to size the brace is made.”

Instead I said nothing and relied on my steely gaze to communicate that her suggestion did not work for me. A few seconds passed, then she relented. And thank God, because the large was by far the smallest I could have fit my hand into, and even then—I found out later, at home, when I went to put it on—I couldn’t work the thing’s eccentric hook-and-elastic latch that was supposed to hold it in place without using a fork to grab the elastic—well, it’s going to be pretty much impossible to comprehensibly describe this further without going all Nicholson Baker on you, so suffice to say I’m glad I tried it on in the store.

When, as I should have expected, the brace did nothing except aggravate the sore spot on my thumb, I decided to go to the doctor.There, a PA named Coty talked about ice and ibuprofen, and maybe if that didn’t help we could try a steroid.

I explained about the upcoming kettlebell class, promised I would ice and use the ibuprofen, but asked if we could maybe also try the steroid right away. He agreed, and I returned to the CVS, where I learned that I would have to wait “fifteen minutes or so” for them to place a blister pack of methylprednisolone tablets in a bag, staple instructions to the front, and hand it over.

While I waited, I browsed the aisles, perhaps exactly as CVS corporate hoped I would. Sure enough, by the time my wait was over, I’d decided to drop another $20 on a bottle of Alleve (to eliminate the need of keeping track of doses of the four-hour Advils that were all we otherwise had in the house) and a package of BeKool “non-medicated gel sheets,” which, according to the package, are “doctor recommended to provide cooling relief from the discomfort associated with…”—well, you know, discomforts. The picture on the front suggested that the sheets would be forehead sized, but I was thinking I could cut them down to bandaid size and wrap my thumb with them, as opposed to trying to figure out some other way to “ice” a thumb.

Once home, I took the first day’s six pills all at once, as instructed

“Any side effects or downsides to watch out for?” I’d asked Coty.

“You might feel a little nauseous, we tell parents kids might get hyper but you probably won’t feel much. Might gain a little weight.”

I downed the six pills, chased it with an Alleve, and modified a BeKool to wrap around my thumb. The weight gain prediction did not turn out to be accurate, but of course Coty might not have realized who he was dealing with. Later, scanning the information sheet that had come with the pills, I learned of the following possible side effects that Coty had not thought to mention:

  • Kaposi’s sarcoma (“discontinuation… may result in clinical remission”)
  • Rupture of the Achille’s tendon
  • “Thin facial skin”
  • Posterior sub-capsular cataracts
  • Convulsions
  • “Psychic derangements”

None of which came to pass. The rest of the day I worked hard making money for the man.

I am pleased to report I seem to be developing a good sardine habit at lunchtime.

Today in local media studies. (Color me dubious.)

The undersigned

I’ve been thinking about my own death a fair bit more than usual lately, and it’s a great feeling. I’m not enjoying imagining the actual dying, but rather the aftermath, in particular how impressed everyone is going to be about my organization and forethought. This is similar to how I soothe myself on a plane taxiing toward the runway, i.e., by imagining how nice my eulogy might sound.

Specifically, Amy and I are finally getting our wills done, which—as everyone knows—you really must do immediately upon becoming parents within no more than ten years after becoming parents, so we’re right on time.

The other day we went to our attorney’s office to look at the drafts she’d produced. As we arrived, I noticed that the office’s sign featured an image of Blind Justice, and then I was chuckling to myself as a picture flashed into my mind of our attorney’s face superimposed onto the image, like something Saul Goodman would do. How I would respect an attorney who did that, and look for chances to retain her.

The plan had been that we would get there early, review the drafts, have any corrections made, and then sign them with the attorney looking on. As we arrived, we learned that the attorney was delayed by an “emergency hearing” at the courthouse but should be arriving soon, so we got down to reviewing on our own in the firm’s small conference room.

It felt good to be so close to signing these documents, on their heavy bond paper, that would formalize our wishes. There was also the aesthetic pleasure of legal language, full of extremely particular wordings necessary for precision and the avoidance of ambiguity, for example the repetition of “children” in the phrase “appoint as Guardians of my children who at the time of my death are minor children.” Yes, it’s clunky, but try to think of another way to nail down the intended meaning.

I particularly enjoyed the section covering the various possible sequences of Amy’s and my deaths. Obviously, if, as is most likely, we die separately and spaced out in time, the relevant will goes into effect. But the boilerplate language suggested and covered other possibilities, namely that we might “die simultaneously”—okay, as the result of “a common accident”—and, still more intriguingly, “under such circumstances as to render it impossible to determine who predeceased whom.”

I imagined the aftermath of some Mexican standoff from a Quentin Tarantino movie, Amy and I discovered lying toe to toe in some bullet-riddled motel room, both of us still gripping a 1911 in each hand. Or our skeletons, uncovered on some desert island, decades after our hitherto unexplained disappearances…

We marked up the documents with all of the typos we found, checked with the receptionist. No updates from the attorney, presumably still held up in court.

We scheduled another meeting and left for home.