Carrying on

Plotting the fall, Part II (November)

(voluntary confinement)

November was upon us, and we were soon to cross an ocean. Josie cat and I were back in Alabama, and my goals for the month included visits with Mama, visits with friends, packing for the next bon voyage, scooping in chocolate milkshakes, siphoning up criminally underrated barbecue sandwiches, bon appetiting tonnes of French pastries, and funneling down unholy amounts of local chocolate. Thanksgiving was on the horizon, and I needed practice for the ultimate feast.

Preparing for a long trip winds me up pretty tightly, but I try to loosen my inner coil by being prepared for letdowns and delays. I work to make itineraries that flex for misplaced bags, early check-ins, or tardy flights, reassuring myself that a white, single, middle-class woman traveling in self-congratulatory first-world efficiency will almost always reach her destination, and if she doesn’t, she can either reschedule, or she’ll be dead. Most of the time that I’m en route, I can shift my control issues into the checked bags and raft along the currents of the day, mouth-breathing out the stress if I hit the rapids. After all, most of the work of overseas travel is done for me; someone else is flying the plane, someone else is moving the bags, someone else is running the de-icing gizmo. Also, life is a little on the short side to spend hand-wringing all the joy out of it; most people I travel alongside seem to grasp this at the lowest level, calculating that acting like a two-legged turd because of a swerve in travel plans doesn’t usually improve a situation. It is difficult, however, to avoid all feelings of upset when months of planning go awry and a solid scheme is threatened with explosive ignorance.

Josie and I were to leave the country on December 1st, and I didn’t know how long we would be overseas. I had booked six months of Airbnb stays, but I was also finally trying to implement my long-stewing thoughts of living abroad, and I’d started the paperwork for a one-year residence permit in Ireland. That one year might end up starting in the middle of my pre-booked half year, or it might start sometime after, or it might never be granted. The uploading and downloading of various physical and virtual documents for my application were clerical tedia that tried for hours to red-herring me from mulling over this uncertainty, or over the risk of homesickness.

(ballooning anxiety)

I’m not thrilled by homesickness, but I am somewhat used to missing friends and family, as it’s a by-product of growing up and leaving home. Since I left parental housing almost forty years ago, I’ve been pretty far from most of the people I love; by now, this distance is weirdly comfortable and not quite as bad as having a long-dead parent. I dread cranking through any new, bleak departure, but I blindly trust that almost every goodbye will be balanced by its respective reunion. Missing more than people, though - foods and smells, dialects and landscapes, holy American calendars of sales - and for an uncertain amount of time. . . that seemed a more jarring challenge.

Sidetracked by nostalgia, the stream of my consciousness glitched a lot during November, surging with irrational longings to visit personal anti-shrines; I drove to them, got out of the car, and stalked up to frankly ordinary places. I deafened myself to intrusive memories of them by telling myself that the goods that used to be in that store window were never the cheap crap they are now, that I’m too bitter and forgettable to cough up for that school’s reunions, that a hotel that ugly deserved to have its lawn puked all over. Seeing sad old haunts made them less powerful, wizened bullies mumbling in nursing home corners. Surely I would be less homesick after saying boo to these ghosts.

There are things I didn’t think I’d miss while I was in another country: having to drive all the time, having to pretend that crumpled roadkill and shattered butterflies aren’t demoralizing, wondering if I’ll lose all my chips in the game of American roulette. I wouldn’t miss having to pay taxes or fork over a monthly chunk of cash for iffy medical coverage, because I’d still be dutifully financing the black holes of government enterprise and health insurance while I was away; I refuse to be a deadbeat citizen, and if I come back to the U.S. even for a minute without health insurance and crash my car without dying, I’ll end up too bankrupt to pay taxes.

(Spock of interest)

Mama’s birthday, meanwhile, was coming up halfway through the month. I was glad to be home for it, but I didn’t really know what to do for it. She wouldn’t be turning an age ending in a magical zero, so I wasn’t obligated to make it a huge deal, but she’s my mother and kind of special, so I perseverated and perseverated on it and finally realized that she had inadvertently told me what would be a nice thing to do to celebrate. She had mentioned a restaurant that a friend had been to, and it sounded interesting, as every backwater joint with a bona fide New York chef does when it’s started up in a crumbling architectural gem.

I made a reservation for us to go there, and we set out for it on the designated Saturday. I hadn’t told mama where we were going, as I have a shy affection for surprising people. Mama’s place is about ninety minutes from the tiny house, and the restaurant was another forty-five minutes from there, but I had arrived at Mama’s in plenty of time for us to make our culinary appointment. We chatted, and I set my GPS, as Mama adjusted her makeup and her outfit and her jewelry and her appliances’ on/off switches to satisfactory levels, and then we left. I drove with confident leisure, and we gabbed easily, Mama trying to guess at our target, and thinking she finally had, saying she thought we were heading to a certain part of town that we then blurred past as my GPS blathered on.

Right on time, we pulled up to the restaurant, got out, moseyed to the door, and found that it was closed. My brain sputtered, not quite stalling. I looked at the sign and saw that this place’s name rhymed suspiciously well with the name of the restaurant of interest. I called the intended restaurant and apologized for our impending tardiness. We would only be a few minutes.

We got back in the car, and despite the sober urgings of my phone’s corrected GPS, I sighed and sighed as I made more miscalculations, including not one but two, two, two instances of turning the wrong way onto a one-way street, the first of which was acknowledged with dysrhythmic civilian honking, and the second of which was heralded by a cop car that was already running its lights, and though seeing the flashing blues did make me consider the logistics of a police chase in such a situation, as it turned out, the police went on their merry way to wreak justice upon someone else.

As thankful as I was that the one-way street had been wide-laned and sparsely trafficked, I was rattled by this avalanche of snafus, and I ended up damning the GPS straight to hell, snapping at my mother, swearing at myself, reeling up a hill off the main drag, ending up in some alley where the front door to the restaurant was distinctly said by the GPS to be, parking the car, getting out again, striding boldly up to the real-world translation of the GPS red dot, which was somehow a windowless door limply chintzed up with Christmas, opening the door to find that I was disturbing a family of five white cigarette-smoking Americans and a dog, groveling apologies to them, closing their door, calling the restaurant again but for directions this time, and still being unable to find the joint until a lady in an apron four doors down walked out into the alley and saw me rigid and flustered and not quite blubbering with frustration into my phone. Mama faithfully followed me up the alley to her foiled surprise.

I flooded the maître d’ with apologies and thanks; she and Mama were both gracious in accepting my regrets. Mama and I were kindly escorted in to the restaurant and taken to a table, only twenty-seven minutes after our reservation had been scheduled. I steamed in humiliated relief, our position on the globe finally correct.

Menus were allocated, water was gulped, and concentrated cocktails were ordered.

We soon got our drinks, but we had stopped sighing and started crazy-giggling with shock before they arrived. I was close to hyperventilating, I was so tickled I hadn’t killed anyone with my car; Mama was pretty happy to have a chance at seeing another birthday. We toasted each other, shared appetizers, and split an entree, leaving ourselves room for a devil’s tower of cake. Mama blew out the candle, probably wishing for less hectic parties in the future. After dinner, we sat and palavered until I had sobered thoroughly enough to drive us back, having no desire for further automotive mishap.

It was a late night for me after I got Mama home, though dinner had started before the November sun had set. At about one a.m., after I’d settled into bed at the tiny house, it became apparent that my gut wasn’t taking kindly to the scallop I’d pawed off Mama’s plate. For about twenty years, I had avoided shellfish - not religiously, but because I didn’t love the bloating and exuberant gas they give me. The symptoms I got after gobbling this rare mollusk will likely deter me from similar dietary derring-do. I won’t relay all the gruesomes, but the offending flesh kept me awake until dawn supplanted my nightlight. Shortly before I lay down to sleep off this exorcism, I called Mama and was pleased to hear that her innards had not been similarly shit the hell out of.

(GPS ≠ 100%)

The week before Thanksgiving, I took Josie to the veterinarian to get her USDA travel certificate. All went well, I thought, but I wasn’t the one who got stuck in the ass with two needles and a thermometer. I was assured that I would be contacted when the required paperwork had been generated by the government and was ready for me to pick it up. Dr. K. is a great vet and had sailed through similar bureaucracy back in the spring; her office’s recent upgrade from emailing to texting made communication with her staff even easier. I got updates every other day or so for the next week.

November’s fourth Thursday, my favorite holiday, arrived. Thanksgiving was at Cousin Judy’s suburban spread, and it was what the holiday should be. Her house, her yard, and her cooking were three-dimensional Southern Living articles spliced up with imagination and humanity. Most of us guests had brought at least one dish, and there were lots of us, but Judy had put her kitchen to the test by cooking the whole feast, including desserts, all on her own before any visitors arrived. Four generations caught up, entertained, and got along while we nibbled a happy dent into delicious mountains of buffet. Not every guest was genetic or legal family; someone’s ex-wife and her succeeding husband were welcomed, and friends from someone else’s work joined the company. Neighbors may have wandered in a few times. The only Issues Discussed were physical medical problems, and we rejoiced at everyone’s survival of the year; only Judy’s blue-eyed brother made a note of politics directly to me, a quick few bars of my own thoughts, before he returned to praising his new puppy. We let good food and good old stories re-glue our family after the election. The weather held at sunny, answering one prayer for all of us.

(comparative truth)

Throughout the month, I had refined the packing of my suitcases. I have confessed to an inordinately strong and ill-reasoned attachment to an excess miscellany of clothing items. As I am middle-aged, I also have an ebbing capacity to lift heavy bags. Packing for Florida required my most gossamer garments for a hot October; packing for six months of fall, winter, and early spring in colder climates in Greece and England meant I had to take a wider range of raiment, lightweight most-weather gear and word-free t-shirts. At last, I was ready to paper-doll myself daily into a sagging pullover and disappointing trousers.

Items of hygiene and validation also went into my portable hoard. If I’m to live without a scalp scabbed up from scratching, without hair that looks like I can’t keep my fork out of the toaster, I want to keep my favorite bathroom condiments with me. If the Irish authorities were to require physical proof of my existence, though PDFs of all my important documents jostle through the cloud, I loaded up paper copies of certain things - my birth certificate, the deed to the house, a notarized color copy of my passport.

(Cat box filler may harbor a killer.)

The cat’s gear had been winnowed down and included minimal kibbles of food and grains of litter she’d need to get from point A to point Airbnb. The Transportation Security Administration website doesn’t give guidelines for packing litter, so I had, for the last two years, left the cat sand in its zip-up canvas litter tray in my carry-on, in case my feline companion needed a pit stop; a cat-friendly friend suggested that a small portion of the travel litter be scooped but used, so that the familiar smell would reassure the cat that I was offering it a trustworthy cat toilet and not some double-crosser that wasn’t worth peeing in. This approach wasn’t attuned to the finest sensitivities of the TSA, and though I wasn’t proud to offend any agents with the reek of cat pee, my primary concern was for my pet.

After six dress rehearsals, the suitcase and backpack were packed. It was the Friday after Thanksgiving, a day for cake at breakfast. Mama had agreed to look after Percy Prius for me while I was away, and we had reviewed Percy’s idiosyncrasies several times, from her life-simplifying keys to her complete inability to signal that someone has left her lights burning when she’s parked and locked. During my last few visits, we had driven around together in Mama’s neighborhood, and Mama had taken notes afterward, checking the manual for details and tucking her stenography in the console. I found a local Toyota service center and put Mama on my car insurance. I was to drive to Mama’s town the next day, and she was to drive me and Josie to the airport the next morning.

But I still didn’t have the cat papers. The updates from the vet’s office hadn’t included protocol for the holiday week, and they had stopped on Monday. Wednesday, I hadn’t called them, because that was my day for baking and peeling sweet potatoes, shopping for wine and odd seasonal gift treats, and deciding not to wear my prickly rhinestone Christmas sweater to hug all the family I’d see on Thursday. I called the office, and the answering machine clarified hours that the boarding part of the practice would be open; I drove out there, feeling partly like a stalker and partly like I was living through some anxiety dream where Josie’s papers hadn’t come and I was going to have to re-book flights and hotel rooms and repack everything. I was early, so I waited in the Prius, talking to imaginary friends and pretending I was singing along to Spotify. About a quarter ‘til kennel-opening time, someone else pulled up in a truck, got out, trotted up to the door, and knocked; an unseen agent let them in. I leapt out of my car as an older couple creaked out of their sedan that they’d just parked. I slowed down to let them go in first, my stomach feeling strapped into a half-full parachute of worry in a tugging wind. The older couple and I went in the door, and after a truncated eternity, I was given my vital pieces of paper. I scanned them quick-like for all the necessary bits, wondering why I was bothering, because no one had time or agency to correct anything at this point, but everything seemed to be in order. Once again, Dr. K. had done everything right. I went back to my car, my gut unharnessed, the parachute lifting away.

I left the tiny house the next afternoon, hugging Alex a few extra times so we wouldn’t forget each other. Josie was bagged up and in the front passenger seat, not exactly pleased. Before I got in the car, my phone rang, and it was Mama, flapping that her Honda’s ignition had spasmed and wouldn’t let her turn off her car. She had already talked to her car’s mechanic, and they had planned for her to go to his shop; she said she’d wait for me there until I picked her up. We hung up, and I hugged Alex again. I got in the car and settled my purse as Alex toted all my leftover groceries and wine up the hill from the tiny house to his other house. Before he’d reached his garage, Mama rang me again to say that her car had unleashed the key. I told her I would check into the hotel I had booked for the night because her cat and my cat aren’t yet friends, and that I would come to her house for dinner.

Josie was left with her cold comforts while I went to Mama’s for a home-cooked meal and our next-to-last dress rehearsal with my car. I peeked in my closet to say goodbye to most of the crap I was leaving behind. Supper was delicious, and our driving excursion was without hiccups, but I was minimal fun on my low-output battery, reserving energy for the next day’s work. Mama and I stilted over what we hoped were final plans for the morning, avoiding any mention of a Big Goodbye, and I left her shortly after nightfall. I was to pick her up at 5 a.m.

I got myself and Josie out of the hotel, to the car, and to Mama’s by about 5:15 for my 7:00 flight. Mama got behind the wheel, and she didn’t need any coaching on running the push-button hybrid all the way to the airport. After several big hugs, she said goodbye, and I went to check in.

As I was paying baggage and pet fees at 5:42, my phone rang. Mama didn’t have my car keys, and she was parked at the far end of the drop-off lane; I apologized, held off cursing at myself in front of the gate agent, and told Mama I’d be out shortly. The checked bags checked, the backpack and the cat re-hoisted, I sweated out to the drop-off lane and walked the keys two blocks to where Mama was idling the car. It wasn’t the least inconvenience I’d caused just to get another hug out of somebody, and Mama was a great sport about it. I watched her drive away, and I went back inside, away from one security and toward another.

(Not always good luck)

Cat litter is dense and makes a bright blob on TSA bag x-rays, so the backpack it’s in is always pulled aside and searched, the litter bag is unshrouded from its multiple Hefties, the bag is unzipped, and the litter in the bag is tested for threatening chemicals. In ten prior flights, the tests had been satisfactory, and I was allowed to re-pack my cat’s equivalent of a used diaper back in my backpack and go on my way. This time, however, the litter tested positive for a mystery compound of a treacherous nature. Yet again, my inner worrier started to pace and run its hands through its hair. The TSA agent called her supervisor over - they were both very nice, thorough federal employees calmly coaxing travelers through the burdens of safety as required by law; their mission was not to pervert the course of Josie, but to follow rules created to keep travelers from being killed by terrorists on U.S. aircraft, and to do so while politely squeezed into boring uniforms. The supervisor redid the assay with a new sample, slotting it into the chemically treated slide. I chanted silently to myself for the next twenty seconds, urging myself to focus on problem-solving tactics, none of which included crying, bellowing, or collapsing. Sadly, though the TSA officer people had both positioned their eyebrows hopefully as they waited for the slide to show them a less positive result, I was politely and firmly informed that I could most certainly not throw away the litter in the nearby garbage can, but that I could either take the bag home or go back downstairs to the check-in booth and check the bag so it went down in the hold. I kept my stress together on the outside, while inside, my wheel of fortune threatened to hurtle right off its spindle.

As my ride was a nervous several miles away at 6:02, I opted to jettison the backpack and check it into the hold. Previous flights had revealed no hint that Josie would ever use the proffered portable litter bag, even on an overseas trip, so I bet on her sphincter tone holding for a domestic jaunt; my own sphincter, meanwhile, was tuned so high that if I’d farted, it would have busted out the windows.

As I walked my shame back to the check-in booth, I calculated what needed to be removed from the bag with litter and taken with me to the cabin. I had a spare phone and a laptop in my backpack, as well as Josie’s irreplaceable health certificate. I didn’t want the lithium batteries to blow up in the hold, and I didn’t want our whole trip to blow up because I didn’t have proof of USDA permission for Josie to cross the Atlantic. A flash of wonder made me question why something that was too hazardous for the garbage wasn’t too hazardous to put in the plane’s cargo. I crouched away from traffic, set down the cat carrier, and extricated my desired items. I closed the backpack and scooped up my slippery stack. I checked my third suitcase and shrugged when the gate agent apologized for the extra hundred-and-fifty-clam charge. The tuners on my sphincter unwound a few half-tones after Josie and I made it through security on our second try at 6:31.

We got to Atlanta, I didn’t forget any loose item on the plane, and we reached our second plane without issue. My activated phone informed me, however, that one of my bags had been misplaced and would arrive at JFK on a later flight that day. The missing bag was my guitar case. I had thought about leaving the guitar at home; it’s not heavy, but it’s bulky, and I don’t play well or often. I took my bag tag to the designated Delta clerk, and she informed me that I would receive my stray bag at my hotel the next morning; as Josie and I weren’t leaving until the next evening, that seemed reasonable. I was also informed that I would be refunded all extra baggage fees, which gave me two hundred and thirty whole clams for dinner and a fresh bag of litter. As I looked for a cab to the hotel, I thanked my luckies that the clams were only metaphorical.

The hotel was in the middle of its chain’s range, clean but not fancy. The concierge, Mario, literally glowed in his uniform, and I thought at first that was just because I was glad to see him after twelve hours of traveling; it turned out that he glows from habitual happiness. He had perfect hair and skin and teeth and a mild accent maybe from a Latin American country, and after I was checked in and had explained how my guitar had hitched a ride on a later flight, he reassured me that I would be notified when it arrived at the desk. Then he reassured me that life was great to live because he believed in a Christian God, and that God had been very good to him.

I always worry a little when strangers talk to me about God, because I grew up in an Alabama town where a Protestant sect of six-year-olds had self-deputized to tell the rest of us kids we were destined for hell - the real one, not just the one like the one I thought church was back then, where I had to wear clampy shoes and saggy tights and icky dresses, not to mention a place that I had to get my ratted tomboy hair rippingly combed out for. This Christian concierge, however, had pretty positive boundaries as he praised the glory of his lord; he just wanted to tell me why he was happy, and he wanted his joy at being alive to make the whole world a better place.

Upstairs in my chamber, Josie too curious to sulk, I searched the internet for unsavory chemicals in cat litter, and it seems that chlorides are the problem, as they can be alchemized into explosives. Not all cat litter has these chlorides, but not all cat litter was available to me in Ozone Park. It wasn’t clear to me from my internet search which cat litter contained chlorides. From previous attempts, I knew that Josie preferred the least organic litter available, so her preferred cat sand would probably contain some detrimental compounds. I headed out on foot to the nearest Key Foods, thinking that a large grocery store would give me a good range of litter options, but also hoping that maybe a smaller market on the way would have any old random bag of litter and shorten my 3.4-mile round trip.

The area I was in was a neighborhood, crowded brick houses with lion-bedazzled gates over the driveways. I came to a main street, with businesses of middling repute. The smell of empanadas distracted me, and I sniffed my way to its source, a small restaurant with linoleum flooring and plastic chairs. I decided to get litter first and then return to this olfactory heaven. A few blocks later, I peeked into a bodega and saw a seven-pound bag of cat litter I recognized; I bought it at a markup that made drug prices seem reasonable, and I hoofed it back to the little restaurant. Three empanadas and a soda can full of fizzy brown water later, I was happier than Mario, and I made it back to Josie with a bag full of clay and a napkin full of cat treats.

Again was the packing recalculated. The litter was split between a zip-loc bag in the backpack and its original package in the checked bag. Any more than about five pounds was to be discarded at the hotel. If I had to jettison the backpack litter, at least I’d have some in the suitcase for when we got to France. The cat’s zippy litter bag would be packed, empty and swathed in Hefties, in the backpack. The checked suitcase bordered on the maximum weight allowed; the estimated weight difference induced by litter redistribution was balanced by transferring a book and a heavy shoe to the backpack. Then I realized I was exhausted. I showered and went to bed, resting for a day of waiting for a nighttime flight to Paris. The plans and the suitcase inventories and the next day’s logistics and the limboed guitar circled their way out of my head as I went off to sleep.

(And no plocking the driveway.)

The day of waiting was slow. Partly cloudy. I was reunited with my guitar. Lunch was another bout of empanadas. I repacked my dirty clothes and toiletries. Josie wandered on and off my lap, as I sat and tried to appear above her suspicion for most of the day. We got to and on the flight without any trouble, and only one of us cried almost all the way to Paris. Who wants to be in a bag all night when they’re used to leaping onto and off of the bed from the witching hour to the wee ones? Having disrupted the sleep of all my fellow passengers, I slunk off the plane to baggage claim and avoided human eye contact until I got us in a taxi. We reached our hotel, and I paid my karmic sleep debt; I couldn’t snooze properly until almost ten p.m. The next morning, we got up in the dark, ready for the last trek of the year, all the way to Greece.

(Thanks again for reading this. Life is short, and you’re busy, so even if you just read the first couple of paragraphs, I appreciate it with most of what is left of my tired old heart. I’m trying to figure out a way to get the old blog, “Lost Paws” from Wix or Spaces or whatever it was, onto this one, but it’ll take a while. Also, it might be illegal. So if you want to waste time reading that while your life might be better served with time with the fam, tuba practice, or scientific study, I’m also honored. Live it up however you like.)