Don't let the door bump your butt!

We love the kid.

Let’s just get that out there from the top.  He’s perfectly loveable and we have no problem with the love thing.  As far as it goes.  Which is further than we might have thought, but still.

He’s a nice kid.  Good manners.  Fun sense of humor. 

And he’s cute.  Very cute.  Easy to please.  And smart!  Oh my goodness, he’s a quick study.  He’s making excellent grades in his second round of college.

Yeah.  He went before.  Trade school.  Extremely promising in terms of parents’ dreams; that is to say in the highly desirable realms of employment and independence. 

He did very well that time too.  But it didn’t pan out.  Meaning, in the gentlest, vaguest of terms, so as not to distress you, Dear Reader, he got distracted.  Took a detour.  Wandered.  Meandered.  Deviated.  Digressed.

And then one morning he woke up!  Maybe on the day when his cousin was having his second child.  Or maybe it was the day when his best friend in high school, voted Most Likely to Develop Enlarged Thumbs from Video Game Syndrome, announced his engagement to an intelligent and beautiful young woman whom Our Kid had kind of fancied in his adolescence.

We thought he was awake anyway.  His eyes were open and he looked right at us.  He wanted to get back into school, he said.  Needed a place to stay while he renewed his commitment to normal.  Hooray!

It’s good, I tell ya.  All good.  We’ve been happy to have him here.  Extremely happy.  Happy happy happy.  Oh yes.  Happy.

So…

Those little dots after the ‘so’?  They represent a finger tapping.  A toe twitching.  A physical expression marking the passage of time.  Or, more accurately, a tell-tale sign that some of us may have lost track of time.  Some of us may have gotten more comfortable that others of us planned for them to get!

Some of us may have expanded into the space available.  Some of us may be thinking this bedroom on the other side of the house is a pretty good deal.

Some of us may have lost touch with their primal teenage urge to break free!

But others of us have not forgotten those things, Grasshopper.  Others of us are keen for your little winter bulb to send up a shoot.  To bloom.  Some of us are looking for the launch, Buddy.  We don’t want to seem too eager; but we’re thinking you seem a bit too content.  I mean, where’s the hunger?

We didn’t come to this grinding of teeth suddenly.  Perhaps it began back in the early weeks of his tenancy when he dutifully let me know that we were out of lunch meat.  Again.  Or he needed shampoo.  Or razor blades.  Or that he had scraped last remnants off the sides of that giant Costco jar of mayonnaise!  O. M. G.

I’m sure I tensed up just a little bit back then.

It’s not that he won’t do whatever we ask – it’s that we have to ask:  Go ahead and load the new roll of TP, Son.  Yes, you can empty the dishwasher.  It’ll be OK.  When the trash is full, that’s your signal to take it out.  No need to wonder about the best course of action.  And when you pass by the newspaper on the driveway, bring it in.  Yes!  You saw it first!  Carry it right on into the house!

He’s close to completing his education and we are trying not to seem too anxious.  We are hoping that he’ll get a job soon and thereby become eligible in the bachelor sort of way.  Is it too forward of me to compose a profile for him on Match.com? 

We’re not trying to pass off a ringer!  Honestly!  We think he’ll make a great husband:  He has an easy-going disposition and is trainable.  Kind of like a Labrador Retriever. 

Which is another reason the Kid needs to go.  Our new puppy arrives today and there’s only so much patience in the reservoir.   

Yes, some young woman will find the Kid loveable, dependable and loyal.  Please.  Help us out here.

Did I mention he’s cute?

Sleeping with one eye open

I think the only way my cat could kill me would be by suffocation.  And she probably won’t do that.

I mean, I am a sound sleeper and all, but still.  She only weighs about seven pounds. 

She is a determined little bugger though.

Once, when she was just two years old, she had had it with me.  She put up with my individual failings and only shook her little round kitty head. 

“These humans!” you could almost hear her say.  In her mind, of course.  Out loud she said very little.  The occasional “Yeow!”  That was enough to express her dismay when I blocked her escape from this hellhole of an existence, for example.

She did escape once.  She dashed immediately to the next court over and climbed about 35 feet up a 40 foot eucalyptus tree.  From there she sat like her Cheshire counterpart and observed, ever so quietly, as I made frantic trips up and down the street, back and forth in front of her and to the side, calling desperately, unaware that she perched soundlessly above me the entire time of my anguished search. 

To amuse herself, she kept her vow of kitty silence.  A young man from the neighborhood spotted her and alerted me to her location.  Mr. Plath came and without hesitating, climbed the tree.  He stuffed her into his zip-front hoodie and scrambled down. 

She never even said thank you.

Another time, when Mr. Plath was out of town, she juked me out at the dining room door, ran like I’d set her afire and climbed a redwood tree in the empty lot next door.  She settled onto a limb about 25 feet up.  I did everything I could think of to coax her down, to no avail.

As night settled in, so did a misty rain.  Still she stayed in the tree.  So, unwilling to call the Fire Department – this isn't Mayberry after all – I went to bed, but woke about 3:30 a.m., distraught and guilty.  I stepped out onto our upper deck adjacent to her branch in my sleep-shirt and called her name softly:  “Uma?”

“YEOW!”  She is so loud for such a small creature!  “Yeow!  Yeow!  Yeow!”  OMG!  She’ll wake the entire metropolitan area!  I slunk back inside and got into my cozy, warm, dry bed.

Next morning while she watched, a friend helped me saw away a lower branch so we could prop a 20-foot extension ladder solidly against that redwood’s trunk.  And I climbed up to get her. 

When I arrived and reached for her, she wrapped her little kitty arms around that branch and gripped it as though I were collecting her for a fricassee. 

I steadied myself and pried her loose.  She dug into my shoulder like an osprey into a big mouthed bass.  I didn't have to hold onto her at all on my way back down the ladder, across the lot and into the house where she promptly hopped down, gave her shoulder a couple of cursory licks and went upstairs for a nap.


You’re welcome.

I mention these things as a means of illustrating her attitude.  Why she runs from her sumptuous kitty life defies explanation.  But clearly, things must be just so or she blames me!  The one who bows and scrapes – steps and fetches for her daily.

Eighteen months ago we brought home a playmate kitty specifically for her, to entertain her and keep her company.  We thought she’d be glad.  But for weeks, if that kitten crossed her field of vision, she growled; her ears lay flat and her eyes glowed with hate. 

She punished me by refusing my affection!  If I came close, she tossed her head like a teenager saying, “As if!”

At length and after delicate diplomacy, she and the kitten JJ have achieved détente if not true peace.  She and I are back to our cuddly, purring selves.

But now, the puppy Dewey is on his way and I wonder what precautions I should take.  Not for him – she’ll put him in his place quick enough.  An innocent puppy is no match for her sophisticated maneuvers.

But what about me?  Am I safe?  What price the menagerie?

A blemish by any other name

I have a blemish on my nose.

And, trust me, “blemish” is the kindest, most gentle euphemism I can muster.  Because in reality, the thing is throbbing.  My eye squints in reflex to the imposition.  My face hurts on that side.  The cats, who love me (and my endless supply of crunchy treats), stare in aloof amazement.

More than a blemish or an imperfection, greater than a flaw or a blotch, this fleck began like that thread of smoke on the map in the opening credits of “Bonanza.”  At first you think, what is causing that, that little dark spot?

But then the heated discoloration spreads and suddenly a flame bursts through expanding wildly.  Oh my God!  It’s the pimple that ate the Ponderosa!  All that’s missing is the theme song.

It arose in the night, just at the lower edge of my nose and now its mounded redness extends almost to my lip on that side, giving me a sort of half-mustachioed look.  And it is not a good look.

Normally, this would not be a topic of conversation or column writing, but I’m saying this pimple is of the large variety.  It is so large that one cannot ignore it, no matter the quality of one’s breeding.  One cannot look away.  It is a train wreck on my face.

That’s right.  This thing is of sufficient size to draw the eye of even the most circumspect of acquaintances and coincidental encounters.  Once glimpsed, one cannot resist its hypnotic pull.  It’s mesmerizing.

In fact, a friend of mine, upon her inability to look anywhere else in this zip code, told me I might as well put some eye blue shadow and false lashes on it and call it Mildred.

So Mildred it is.  I only wish I had studied ventriloquism so that I could answer the unspoken comments I read on the faces of those manning cash registers around town.  Yes!  We had to leave the house, Mildred and I.  The cats were out of treats for God’s sake.

That poor young girl in the red vest at Target – she did her best to be polite.  But Mildred would not be denied a place in her consciousness.  She demanded a second glance. 

Then the girl forced her eyes upward to mine, desperate, searching for some kind of relief.  “Did you find everything you need?” she pleads, her own eyes watering from the strain of her effort to avoid Mildred’s siren song.

She followed protocol, but I know what that girl wanted to say:  Clearasil is in the Health and Beauty section.  You can find Band-Aids near the peroxide.  Air filter masks in the paint department.  Veils on Aisle 9!

We pressed on to the post office, then Safeway.  If we could, Mildred and I would shout, “What’re YOU looking at?” knowing full well exactly what that guy at Ace Hardware was drawn to:  My Mildred has the gravitational pull of a black hole.

He really couldn’t help himself.

We are now five days in and Mildred shows no signs of retreat.  She has grown comfortable in her new nasal digs.  She thrives on the attention.

I have resisted the adolescent urge to poke and shove, my mother’s admonitions echoing in my ears, “Don’t pick at it!  You’ll only make it worse!”

I am not sure how Mildred could get any worse than the swollen abomination she is, but I am unwilling to tempt fate.  No witch hazel, no Campho-Phenique, no lemon, no ice, no tea tree oil will dissuade her from her full life expectancy.  I’m sure of it:  They would only enrage her and cause her to linger out of spite.

So we have settled into an uneasy truce, which actually means I have surrendered.  My confidence drained.  My spirit wan.  Expectations reduced. 

I am back to age thirteen, furtive and self-conscious, certain that everyone is focused on my flaw BECAUSE THEY ARE!

Mildred prevails.  She has taught me her object lesson in humility.  I have taped a printed sheet over the place where my face would be in the mirror.  It says, “You look fine.”

Thank you Mildred.  Thank you so very much.

In case you were resting easy

Scanning the headlines this morning looking for cutting edge info for you, Dear Reader.  I am always on the alert for items to uplift you, to keep you safe and brighten your day.

And we are in luck:  From the TodayShow.com:  5 potentially deadly body pains you should never ignore. 

I figure the Today Show staff put this article together a while ago to use as filler on a slow news day – you know, a day where nothing truly awful happens in the world, but they must fulfill their mission of keeping us unnerved.

Or, maybe in their efforts to court the paranoid hypochondriac viewer, the Today Show has doomsday medical personnel on hand to develop a cache of items to stress about, just in case our days are filled with rational assessments and calibrated responses. 

For example, #1 on the list of You’d-better-worry-over-that-twinge-you-just-felt-because-everyday-things-are-just-waiting-to-kill-you! – Leg or calf pain could be: Deep vein thrombosis!

Deep vein thrombosis – A blood clot in a leg vein.  Yikes!  

“If you have a pain in your leg that feels different from a cramp, get to the emergency room!" admonishes emergency room physician Leigh Vinocur, with an urgent tone.

“We don’t want a clot to travel to your lungs and cause pulmonary embolism." 

No we don’t!  And thank you so much for putting me in a state of constant anxiety since I am now at a stage in life where everything hurts sometimes and leg cramps are the least of it!

Now we do not want to make light of a serious condition, but really?  That’s the progression of thought?  From, “Hey, this feels different from a leg cramp,” to “911!  Help!  Help!  My leg hurts!  I’m dying!  I’m dying!  Come get me!”

I’m just sayin’ there must be an interim step or two.

Because if you do go to the ER, it will require a sophisticated analysis of your leg pain.  You want to be sure that the pain you describe to the emergency room doctor is not confused with a garden variety charley horse.  So get your details in order before you pick up the phone:

“No!  This is not just any cramp.  I wouldn’t ask for a gurney for a common cramp!  This is totally different.  I would call this more of a contraction.  On the whole twinge–convulsion spectrum, this would probably rate somewhere in the realm of a spasm.  Not your typical spasm, though, or I would have just rubbed it like I usually do and begged off my Pilates class, like a normal person.”    

Deep vein thrombosis is sometimes called “economy class syndrome” because it affects car or plane travelers who sit long hours in cramped spaces, or people at work, or those who watch movies curled up on the couch or maybe a baseball game from the cheap seats. 

Great.  We’re in the ER, now what?

"They will do ultrasounds.  If it’s positive, they’ll give you blood thinners because we don’t want the clot to travel to your lungs and cause pulmonary embolism!" says the doc gleefully. 

OMG!!  Thank you so much for your dark warning!  What else should I be worried about?

#2. Upper back pain?  No!  I get that every day when I hunch over the computer to read this stuff!  Could be: Aortic dissection?!  You mean I could have a tiny tear in my aorta that allows the blood to create a false passage!  A false passage!  I hate that!  Not to mention the fact that all this screen time could lead to stroke, paralysis and kidney failure.  Holey Moley!

#3.  Dental pain?  Could be the popcorn hull that I couldn’t dislodge last night during our binge-watch of “House of Cards,” or: Ludwig's angina; a tooth abscess that has traveled down your neck causing swelling, your voice to sound funny and drooling.  Oh.  That. 

“It can actually track down to your airway and cause airway obstruction” Vinocur said, adding: "Don’t let a tooth ache get that bad.”  Thanks Mom.

Let’s see…#4.  Headache?  I’m afraid to ask…?  Sleeping funny?  “Downton Abbey” is unavailable to stream?!  No!  It could be: A bleeding stroke!  Aaauugh!

#5.  Abdominal pain?  Brace yourself…Could be: Ruptured ectopic pregnancy!? 

OK.  Well.  Some things don’t scare me.

Who's counting anyway?

OK look.    We are only in Day 5 of this whole scenario, so it is a bit too early to say if this is the good news or the bad news.  We remain uncertain at this time.  But here we go…drumroll…

Ladies and gentlemen!  Mr. Plath has retired!

He has left the building.  He is not going back into the building.  No.  Of that much we are certain.  He is staying home.  With me.

And therein lies the tentative nature of our relationship.  After 25 years of marriage, will retirement,with its enforced togetherness, its mandatory glee, be the end of us?

Back in the day – last week, to be specific – we had a comfortable, if one-sided, routine:  The alarm went off at 6 AM and the coffee pot beeped; we turned on the news and had a bowl of granola. 

He got in the shower at 6:15, a warm and gentle human being.  Then, as though the shower stall were some futuristic contraption designed for making Men in Suits, the disheveled and groggy guy who stepped in came out seven minutes later sleek, focused, and standing at the boardroom table – mentally anyway – a working man with his working face already working. 

Hair drying, for him a 20 second operation, was sufficient to whisk all thoughts of life outside the corporate campus from his consciousness.  He barely acknowledged me as I watched his transformation. 

Only moments ago he had been in his dream world of duck blinds and hip waders, but now, as he buttoned himself down, his expression changed with his internal dialogue.  I imagine it went something like this:  “That’s right Joe; we have to trim the fat!  If we want to increase our net end-of-the-year functional profitability equation matrix, something’s got to give!”

But what he’d say was, “Love ya, Honey!  Home around seven!”  And with a whoosh and swoop, I had the house to myself.

How I spend my days is not open for scrutiny just now.  See, I could tell him whatever I wanted.  Maybe I went to movie after movie and ate popcorn all day.  Maybe I had a mani and a pedi and one of those face mask thingies.  He was never the wiser.

So long as the house was clean and dinner on the table, what did he care?  More accurately, how could he care after a 12 hour day of meetings wrapped at both ends with a glorious 40 minute commute? 

At the end of those days, he was just glad to take off his shoes.

So he made his Victory Lap, going to farewell party after congratulatory luncheon.  He played golf and smiled for the camera and got cards and cakes and slaps on the back and affectionate ribbings. 

And when it came time to turn in his laptop and security badge, he had not a moment’s nostalgia.

And now he’s home and there are no more secrets.  No more ethereal answers to, “How was your day, Honey?”  He’s right here.  He can see exactly how my day is.

Suffice it to say that, having retired four years ago myself, I have thoroughly relaxed out of my own time-served in the institutional life. 

Oh, I get up and do things, but leaping out of my cozy Tempurpedic after it has molded to my body creating the best possible sleep experience, disturbing the cats and launching into activity is not the way it goes at 6-the-bleep-thirty, thank you very much.

I expected the worst – a watch-tapping version of my father, to-do list in hand and disapproving gleam in his eye.

But to my amazement, Mr. Plath does not wake up without the alarm.  I can pull out my book and read for a good stretch until … OMG!  Is he going to sleep all day?!

No.  No he’s not.  There he is!  Mr. Sleepy Head.  So sweet. 

We have had five leisurely mornings with coffee and the Today Show.  Granola in bed.  Repeated reveling about this lovely new phase of life and the great big beautiful world around us.

So we reside now in what you might call the Honeymoon Stage of his retirement.  Like newlyweds, we are happy!  So very happy!

And they said it wouldn’t last!

Music soothes the old brain

Recently, I found myself in a room with a saxophone.

Apparently, I arrived in the midst one of those “common but mysterious short-term memory failures, [where] people find themselves in a room, without remembering why they ended up there.”

Precisely. 

So, there I was, a little bit breathless, and pondering:  Moments ago I was there, but now I am here.  With a saxophone. 

Why am I here? 

This is not an existential question.  I know why I am here.  I am here to make the world a better place.  Duh.  Everyone knows that, right? 

Nevertheless, in spite of my certainty regarding the meaning of life and my place in the universe, I was hard-pressed to know what-the-what I was doing in that particular room at that specific moment with an E-Flat saxophone.

And then there was the sax itself, staring back at me; also no doubt, wondering how we wound up together.  Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…!

Researchers say the doorway may be to blame. 

That’s right.  According to Gabriel Radvansky, a psychologist at the University of Notre Dame, the very act of walking through a doorway may tell your brain since a new scene has begun, it should store prior memories, thereby causing strange memory lapses.  

"Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an 'event boundary' in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away… Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized."

OK.  Perhaps it is existential.  I think I forgot why I came into this room; therefore I am essentially still in the other room. 

Or, maybe these ‘event boundaries’ are my own personal wormholes whereby Morgan Freeman messes with me just because he can. 

In theory, mental event-boundaries are useful (so says Mr. Notre Dame) because they help us organize our mental timelines and remember not just where, but also when a particular event happened.

I get it.  It’s like when Mr. Plath asks me, for example, how long we’ve had Netflix and I piece together the answer by saying, “My hair was still long because the first one of those red envelopes got stuck in it when I thought I had to lick it to seal it and my hair got in the way.  And I thought we’d be able to get ‘Finding Nemo,’ which was about 2004; but of course we never could, which makes me wonder if we should go ahead and subscribe to HBO Go or one of those other movies services?”

It is patching into place memories – like passing through doorway after mental doorway, event boundary after event boundary, until he’s gone into another room wondering why he even asked me such a question in the first place.

But I digress.

I have crossed through a portal into a room which contains a saxophone.  To find out why, I need only retrace my steps, turning back the swinging doors of the event boundaries that brought me here.

Easy peasy.

Let’s see:  I had been wondering, after mistaking an old movie for a good movie, “What is that thing where you forget the ending of a bad movie and wind up watching the whole thing with a nagging suspicion that you’ve seen it before only to find, in the last unraveling of the plot, that you do remember the stupid ending of the thing and you just lost two precious hours of your life watching it again?”

So I went online to find out how to stop doing that annoying thing. 

I found an article at Live Science entitled “People with Dementia May Have Hidden Talents, Strange Case Shows.”

It told the story of a man in South Korea who was formerly meek and mild but got dementia and began saying what he thought at work without regard for the feelings of others.  Kind of like what’s-her-name at Sony Studios who said Angelina Jolie was a self-absorbed brat or whatever.  But then he started playing the saxophone and it made him nicer again.

And I thought, wow, that could be me.  The hidden talent part, I mean.


And I wound up in a room with a saxophone.

The Oscar better not go to ...

OK.  Let me just speak directly to the Academy.  And I offer this in the best, most generous possible spirit:

If you select “Boyhood” as the Best Picture of the Year…You are done.  You are dead to me!  I don’t know you or your family. 

Because I have had it!  I.  Have had.  IT!

Or, I will have had it, to use the future subjunctive mood, since we don’t yet know what’s in the hermetically sealed jar on Funk & Wagnall’s porch.  We have only a sneaking suspicion.  And if our suspicions are borne out, we will be in an extremely subjunctive mood!

I’m just sayin’.

You know what?!  No!  I’m not just sayin’.  I’m warning you!

Don’t do it!  Do not choose a tedious, pointless underwhelming piece of tedious (yes, I said it twice!) monotony as the Best Picture of the Year just because it took the guy 12 years to make it.

Of course it took him 12 years!  He kept falling asleep!

Not only that, his actors probably wandered away, not recognizing that movie-making was in the works.  Like so many Alzheimer’s patients, they drifted off toward the mall, unaware that anything requiring their presence was underway nearby. 

They had to be tracked down and corralled again and again and made to go through the same mundane motions they’d just completed the year before when they were 12 months younger.  Wow.  Isn’t that amazing.

But no worries!  It wasn’t a hardship for them.  After all, there were no lines to learn or depths of emotion to plumb.  Nobody was put out by the pesky demands of acting!  There was no need of a method!

Furthermore, the film has no beginning.  It just starts.  Of course every film just starts, but come on!  Good story telling leaps into the middle of the action.  We are plunged into the grit, the heart, the essence of our protagonist and his struggles.  But not in this compilation of scenes:

“The child of divorced parents, Mason, learns to navigate through a world in which the strengths and frailties of the adults around him have a profound impact on his own life.”

No.  Not profound.  More accurately, the impacts are common.  Typical.  Run-of-the-mill.  Every day.  No need for concern.  And oh, what I wouldn’t give for some good, old-fashioned concern! 

Ah, there it is!  Maybe this film was put together for those who need a break from the stress of dramatic conflict.  There must have been those movie goers who cried out for a respite from so much man against man, man against nature, and man against himself.  All that exploration of the human condition was just too hard to take for those delicate ones. 

Linklater to the rescue!  But he didn’t ride up on his stallion, sabre aloft.  More like he pulled up in a golf cart, wearing plenty of sunscreen, ever mindful to stay within the lines – not-too-hot, not-too-cold, but just room temp.

And how did they know when they were finished?  My money says they didn’t know.  They could go on for another decade and be no worse for the wear.  As it is, they just drifted away from the apartment where Mr. Linklater had set up his camera and let it record whatever came into frame.  OMG.

And the Academy’s all atwitter. 

But you know what?  That’s OK.  I’m going to have my party anyway.  People are coming with finger food wearing sparkly clothes and we are going to have fun!  That haphazard assemblage of 7000 Academy members cannot dash our dreams.

Let them ignore the ballot for their zombie-like fixation on a trance-inducing 165 minute ordeal.

Go ahead and pass over “Whiplash,” and “American Sniper.”  “Selma” for God’s sake!  “The Theory of Everything”!  “The Imitation Game”!  If you want to go quirky choose “Birdman.”  Or even “The Grand BudapestHotel.”

But “Boyhood”?  No flippin’ way.  No way!

If you choose “Boyhood” as the Best Picture of the Year, I swear I will never, ever go to Party City again and stock up on black and gold glittery decorations.  No more helium balloons only to have your nonsensical decisions stick a pin in them!

Oh, all right.  I will probably do just that.

Same time, next year.