While My Boyfriend Was Sleeping

What I write after Joe and Henry go to bed

Rock me mama: Growth and change in 2014

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I started this post a couple weeks ago and my intentions were to discuss the ways in which I think I’ve grown as a person, a mother and a journalist. I also intended to discuss the ways in which I think Joe has grown as a person, a father and a journalist. I thought this would be semi-interesting to at least four people.

I intended to share some of my brilliant and ghastly time management strategies, as well as some of my brilliant and ghastly potty training strategies.

I thought I’d tell you that Henry regularly uses the toilet, but since he also regularly bites other humans, throws close-fisted punches and flings chewed food on myself and the dog I wouldn’t say he’s 100 percent housebroken yet.

I thought I’d tell you we got a new dog.

Folding him into our life has helped fill a void and mend an ache. After months of huffing Cubbie’s favorite blanket in an attempt to bring him back, I washed it today for the first time with a load of sheets.

I thought I’d tell you that after a year of hustling as a freelancer, work is starting to happen with as much surprising regularity as Henry’s good potty days. This month I filled my calendar with so many projects and assignments I had to turn down work.

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How I made peace with letting my dog go

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It’s been 10 whole days since Cubbie left this world. Sometimes it feels like 10 whole seconds. Other times it feels like 10 whole years. I’m not sure I want it to feel like either.

Grief is weird. Sometimes it crushes you. Sometimes it numbs you. I knew with Cubbie it would crush me. I’ve logged far too many hours with this wide-eyed rotund creature to not feel heartbroken by his death. I was as they say, obsessed.

I’d have it no other way. He was my best friend on four legs, my office manager, my confidante, my softest spot before Henry and my most loyal companion before Joe.

In the end, he loved Joe as much as he loved me and I will forever remember my husband kissing his warm, still face in those heavy moments after he was euthanized. I will forever remember Joe’s grief, because there was no other person on the face of this planet who loved Cub as much as I loved Cub. The first half of Cub’s life was spent on my lap. The second half was spent on Joe’s.

Our sidekick is gone, robbed of time. In December he would have turned nine – 63 in dog years.

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Pure imagination: Is technology killing or cultivating creative thinking?

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Henry’s toy collection is all over the place, as in it’s (figuratively) diverse and (literally) scattered all over the house.

He’s got stuff that talks and moves, beeps and flashes. He’s got a workbench filled with tools that look and sound like the real deal. He’s got a train that whistles and rolls with the help of a AAA battery. He’s got a guitar that doubles as a keyboard and a set of John Deere tractors that double as throwing stars when hurled in fits of rage.

He’s got a hand-me-down tricycle, a hand-me-down kitchen set and a hand-me-down horse on a set of squeaky springs. He’s got Legos and blocks and puzzles and books. He’s got a toy rocket, a wheelbarrow, a lawnmower, a leaf blower, a trampoline and a vacuum.

Wait. He’s got two vacuums – an upright and a canister.

He’s got a dog that won’t stop talking, a bear that won’t stop singing and a baby doll from the Goodwill that wont stop threatening to stab me in my sleep.

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Cheer up sleepy Jean

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What has got me so emotional right now? Could be 100 things. Could be the fact that I’m listening to a long, slow cover of The Monkee’s Daydream Believer. Suppose it could be something about the lyrics.

I could hide beneath the wings
Of the bluebird as she sings.
The six o’clock alarm would never ring.
But six rings and I rise,
Wipe the sleep out of my eyes.

Could be the heartbreaking realization that my beloved dog is not getting any better. He’s blind now. He spends his nights panting and grunting. Pacing. Begging for more food and more water because the drugs he’s on make him more hungry and more thirsty than his usual ravenous self, which means he has to go to the bathroom ALL THE TIME.

I carry him down the stairs. I carry him up the stairs. At 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. I’m outside with bare feet guiding him to a tree so he can pee. Sometimes this reminds me of when he was a puppy and I used to carry him down my apartment steps because he was still too little to do them on his own.

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Smash hit, or how to react when your toddler breaks your guitar

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This happened last week:

Joe walked into our bedroom after taking a shower. Henry, as usual, was waiting (impatiently) for him to exit the bathroom.

“Daddy out shower!” He exclaimed as Joe walked past him in a towel.

“Daddy PWAY Henry!”

Joe stopped to pat Henry on his soft blonde head as he made his way to the closet to get dressed. Henry, feeling slighted, walked over to Joe’s guitar, which was perched, as usual, on its stand, and without so much as a warning, pushed it over in one swift, deliberate move.

CRASH.

I was in the kitchen packing Joe’s lunch. (Editors note: before you assume I’m a domestic goddess who always packs her husband’s lunch, you should know that Joe takes the same two things to work every day: a tuna sandwich and a bag of Doritos. It takes me longer to wash the smell of fish off my hands than it does to prepare the lunch.)

I heard the guitar hit the floor. Like a bone breaking, I heard it shatter. I heard Joe scream and Henry cry.

“Nooooooooo!” Joe said. “Nooooooooo! Nooooooo!”

I’ve seen Joe lose his shit before. I’ve smelled his fear and tasted his dread. I’ve tried, usually with little success, to quell his panic at moments such as this.

Like for example …

Last month, I watched his face turn white when he realized he’d devoted the cover of his newspaper to the promotion of an event that had already happened. A year ago, I watched him projectile vomit out a window on the interstate while driving in rush hour traffic. Three years ago, I watched him weep when his brand new flat screen TV exploded in front of his eyes. (Who can forget that?) And early in our relationship, I watched him pitch his bicycle into a grassy median and demand I pedal home and get the car after I had pushed him too far on a ride.

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Upon waking

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Last week I had a dream.

I dreamed I was on a date with my husband. We were walking hand in hand through Ybor City in downtown Tampa. It was late. The sky was black. The streets were filled with people scattering like bugs, people spilling out of bars and clubs, women teetering atop stilettos, men pretending to have muscles in sweat-soaked shirts, electronic dance music pumping electricity onto the sidewalk, thunder clouds rolling in.

The streetlights were so bright they blotted out lightening.

Everything was obscured by darkness, trailed by neon and pulsing like a heart, a neon heart squeezing and releasing.

In my dream it began to rain. Water pooled like molten silver at my feet. People began to scatter faster. Cars began to accelerate. We crossed railroad tracks, Joe’s Adidas tennis shoes sloshing through the mud between the tracks. I picked up the hem of my dress, giggling at some joke he had made about running in the rain.

I suddenly couldn’t remember where I had parked.

Rather than lecture me about my forgetfulness, Joe teased me. We were on our first date. I was the free-spirited one, the non-planner, the girl in old flip-flops, cutoffs and short hair, which I had lazily trimmed the night before with my friend’s kitchen scissors.

We had yet to fall in love, my husband and I.

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A love letter in a Rubbermaid tote

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lace wig

I’ve never been a big fan of fate.

It’s a lazy ideology and an easy way to make sense of the fortunes and misfortunes that steer the course of our lives.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a wistful dreamer with an overactive imagination; raised without a religion, save for the convictions I borrowed from a dog-eared copy of “The Little Prince.”

I’m not saying fate doesn’t exist. I’m just saying I’m better equipped at tempting it than I am at waiting for it to happen, because often it’s the choices we make (or don’t make) that decide our destiny.

I found proof of this a couple months ago buried under a stack of clothes in my bedroom closet.

A love letter in a Rubbermaid tote.

I came across it the way we often come across faded notes and old photographs: by accident, by chance, by fate or whatever you’d like to call it.

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No disrespect to missing dogs

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Once upon a time, on a day too dark and chilly for sunbathing, my sister PK and I sat in my living room in St. Pete, telling stories about odd apartment neighbors.
PK lives next door to a guy who used to keep his kid’s hamster in a cage outside his apartment, presumably because tenants aren’t allowed to have pets.
One day the hamster just disappeared. Gone. Cage and all.
Inspired by the number of missing dog signs in my neighborhood, PK and I designed a hypothetical missing hamster sign.
MISSING HAMSTER
REWARD $75
Male teddy bear hamster
Age: 2 1/2
Has small ears, tiny eyes and strawberry blonde fur
Has black fleck on front right paw
Last seen on wheel
Call: ###
And yes, we printed out a dozen copies and tacked them to telephone poles around my neighborhood.
Please don’t chastise me. I’m a sucker for missing animals. Remember Pooh Bear?
Lighten up and do something funny for the helluvit. It’s April Fool’s Day – nine days before my birthday! For hoax-y inspiration, click here.
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PS. Please swing by Name Your Dream Assignment and vote for my friend Ricci. I’ve sung her praises numerous times. She’s an amazing photographer and she has only a few days left to win this contest. Voting ends April 3.

My pug gets better mileage than your SUV.

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An ode to my pug’s paws:

I haven’t met a dog fanatic who hasn’t expressed joy over their pet’s exquisite paws.
My pug’s paws are works of art. The black pads, all circular and button-like, get so rough I want to exfoliate my face with them. They feel like the old upholstery buttons on my parent’s scratchy couch. 
Whenever we go for long walks, I’m grateful for the pug’s durable pads. They can endure sticks and stones and random sharp sidewalk debris. Honestly, the pug’s paws are better equipped for outdoor traversing than the shitty flip-flops I wear every day.
Sometimes he will get a thorn stuck between his pads, and rather than howl and whimper with his paw in the air, he will soldier on – 27 pounds of pug marching onward into the neighborhood with a limp so slight passing dogs barely notice he’s lost rhythm. 
The paws themselves smell like corn chips. Many dog’s paws smell this way. I know it’s disgusting and you may think me vile for it, but I love to sniff the pug’s paws. Like a kid with a runny nose seeking out his favorite germ-drenched blanket, the pug’s paws fill me with a fuzzy warmth that coats my heart in cashmere and aids in the flow of serotonin. 
And the fur! The fur looks like wood grain on a two-by-four leg of lumber cut from an ancient oak tree – so straight and so smooth when you pet with the grain, and so course and so stiff when you pet against the grain. 
But it’s the pads that impress me most. It’s the pads that I envy when I look at my own fleshy feet. 
When the pug and I camped across the country, he stepped on many a wicked thorn, nosed around in many a pricker bush, popped a squat on many unforgiving cacti, but no pointy plant was too sharp for his dime-sized paw pads. 
His paws shatter toy breed stereotypes. They are as rugged and rigged for outdoor adventure as the paws on a Bernese Mountain Dog. 
If it weren’t for my pug’s vacuum-sealed face, he’d have soared over sand dunes in Bandon Beach, Ore. with the ease of a heron.  
If it weren’t for his asthmatic lungs, I’m certain he would have combed the The Rockies like a mountain lion hunting elk at dusk.
If not for his diesel engine pulmonary system, combusting externally in the North Carolina heat, I’m confident the pug’s muscled legs would have carried him up the Blue Ridge Mountains to the top of the Grove Park Inn, where together we would’ve sipped tea in high-backed Adirondack chairs facing the sunset.
And perhaps if his sausage roll body had been a little less eggplant-shaped, we’d have frolicked the Ozarks like Maria and Captain Von Trapp. 
If the rest of him would keep up, my pug’s paws would outperform Firestone Tires. 
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PS. Photo of my courageous pug after he lumbered his way to the top of a red rock formation in Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs. 
PPS. When the pug is not ascending sedimentary beds of sandstone, he slumbers on top of Joe’s head in a queen-sized bed in St. Petersburg, Fla.
PPPS. Note: I purposely did not mention the pug’s trifling dewclaw. 

Attachments.

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I have a tendency to write in either clipped sentences that make my Aunt Debbie laugh, or long tangled ones that stretch and pull like heavy muscles after a long bike ride.

Sometimes I can’t write at all. Sometimes I can’t stop. It’s what some therapists call an addiction and other therapists call an outlet. To me they’re one in the same – addictions and outlets – marked by bouts of happiness and bouts of sadness. Marked by what we mull over on long drives home as the evening sun blinds us, making us squint, making us look in the rearview mirror to check our makeup or to check our teeth, where upon doing so we discover that years of squinting has etched lines on our face, which is why I suppose the passage of time is often illustrated by lines.

I know she was just a fish, so I’ll just make this clear: it’s not about the fish. It’s about what we get attached to. And how we get attached. Attached to people, to TV shows, to bands, to cars, to brand names, to favorite pubs and football teams. And it’s not just humans either. My dog is so attached to me that when I don’t come home after work Joe tells me he sits with his nose to the front door and waits.

Some people cynically spin the word attachment and call it baggage. If you’ve met someone who brags that they have no baggage, don’t buy it. No baggage means no attachments and the minute you hear that B.S., be wary. A person with no baggage is either deeply repressed, deeply afraid or deeply alone.

In 2002, when my favorite show Ally McBeal went off the air I remember retreating to my bedroom and crying softly into my pillow. On the surface it was a pitiful act. I remember my father snorting under his breath as I whimpered during the final David E. Kelley credit.

“Christ kiddo. It’s just a skinny broad on TV.”

And I remember my friends stopping by the house to cheer me up – half joking, half not – because they understood that even if I was a fool to mourn the skinny broad I had, from age 15 to 20, identified more with that neurotic, hallucinating, love struck lawyer than any other female character then or since.

Joe says Ally McBeal was my Mary Tyler Moore.

Attachments vary of course in seriousness. I was also, for about ten years, attached to a Paula Abdul concert tee shirt my mother found at a Goodwill store in Hamburg, N.Y. Even though I had never seen Paula in concert – and I promise you I begged – I became unreasonably attached to this tee shirt.

I’d wear the shirt to school, to bed, to the airfield where my father flew his model airplane, to my Oma & Opa’s house for dinner. I wore it so much I convinced myself (and others) that I had actually gone to the concert. I held onto it for years. And when I finally threw it out sometime in 2005, a pang of wistfulness stabbed at my memory and I’m sure in my montage of memories I thought: what a great concert.

My office fish Martha died last week. She was 11 months old. Her bowl was cloudy and she was acting listless the day before, which gave me pause because Martha was usually a plucky fish. Just last week I gushed to my coworker Kyle, “Man, she’s a cute fish, isn’t she?” To which one of our editors replied, “Can fish be cute?”

It was in the way she swam – dive bombing the bottom of her bowl and then rushing to the surface to eat pellets and blow bubbles, staring at me with one distrustful eye and out the office window with one trustful eye – that reminded me of Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffanys. She was a pale fish. Colorless really, which is why I chose her. All the other Betas in the pet store were red, purple, orange and blue. Ostentatious fish with gaudy dramatic fins.

Martha was understated. Sleek, simple, yet an extrovert.

I realize now that I probably overfed her. According to every Beta web site I tracked down, cloudy bowls are an indication of overfeeding. (Kyle you’re off the hook. Perhaps by keeping her lean while I was on vacation you extended her life span by two weeks.)

So the next morning I spread myself out on the balcony with my computer, a cup of coffee and Patty Griffin on repeat. Noticing that a U-Haul was running at the apartment next door I did what I do best, and spied at the two women below as they stood hugging, saying goodbye and promising to keep in touch. I recognized the mover as a woman I named Plant Lady after the litter of busted ceramic pots and Little Shop of Horrors ferns she keeps by her door.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from living at five different addresses in four years it’s that apartments are ghostly things. Unlike houses, apartments take shape after a person moves in. A shithole can look like a two-page spread in Better Homes & Gardens if someone with a decent sense of feng shui and fine art occupies it, and though I rarely get attached to my neighbors, I do in a sense get attached to their presence … and their stuff. 
Once when I lived with my friend Zac in a second-story apartment in downtown Sarasota, I got attached to the habits of the couple two doors down. I grew accustomed to the sound of their baby crying, their deafening television set and their evening cigarettes, even though we didn’t talk, save for the occasional “hello,” “goodnight,” and “how’s the baby?”
 
Zac and I nicknamed them Man, Woman and Baby. And just knowing they were there was a comfort. Occasionally Man would mention his being a pastry chef on Longboat Key and according to Zac, he would sometimes bring leftover tarts to our door, the likes of which I never saw much less ate. 
One weekend Man, Woman and Baby moved away. I never said goodbye. Never even saw the U-Haul. And still I missed them. Especially their pastries.

I read a NY Times essay this week in which an Iraq war vet – now safely stationed in Brooklyn and “non-deployable” after getting shot in Baghdad – mourns the loss of his overseas daydreams, most of which centered around Natalie Portman:

“… She and I would have dinner in a darkened restaurant, somewhere hip and stratospherically expensive, thick with the smell of polished wood. The swirling flashbulb-pop taste of something unpronounceable on my tongue; looking up, smiling and feeling the shivering joy of having her laugh at a witticism of mine.”

Attachments. All of it. Material. Ephemeral. The things we sometimes take for granted. The things we don’t. I’m sitting here watching Plant Lady pull away thinking straight lines are pinched by the passage of time and even though we never met, I’m going to miss her man-eating ferns. 

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PS. Photo by Cate Cuerden. For her Flickr photostream click here.