1 June 1999: Abandonment

I made an appointment for Blake for Thursday. He's fine, I'm sure he's fine, he acts fine, birds are actors. So to his regular doctor he goes. A fecal smear to test for intestinal ailments, a crop swab or something to see if his crop is infected (which is what killed Percy, besides me), a weigh-in.

I am not going to take him. Dot Org does not allow sick time for vet appointments, which childless I think is silly. I asked if I could take vacation time, and I can, but RDC suggested reasonably that he could work at home and then take him and I wouldn't have to take vacation hours or drive downtown to work. This makes me somewhat crazy since I have always taken Blake, whether with RDC or without, but I recognize I am not thinking rationally here.

So.

I was glad the holiday meant that we could both stay home all day with our little buddy on Monday, but by 3:45 on Tuesday I was having serious abandonment issues. It was I who left Percy to die alone in the previous vet's incubator. I made excellent time on the way home. If I could spin like that every day and not just when I'm worrying that my baby has expired in the six hours he was alone, I could get my legs back.

When I threw open the door, naturally my eyes were riveted on the cage. Which was empty from my viewpoint: was he dead on the floor? This thought flit through my head in the instant it took Blake's greeting to travel from study to door: "Wheet wheet?" whereupon I noticed the cage door was open and realized RDC had Blake--he was alive.

Okay. No more panicking. Breathe calmly.

I didn't think about Blake to the exclusion of all else Tuesday. I remembered to go to Walgreen's at lunch for box of OBs. The cashier ducked the box (which I had been idly spinning while in line, as I would anything I carried, just to occupy my hands in the queue) under the counter and into one bag as I said, "I don't need a bag," and then into a second bag, telling me that no one needed to see what I bought. Old bag herself.

I don't carry a sign around

I currently am menstruating

anymore than I announce

It has been seventeen hours since I last voided my bowels

but damn--I, a female, am 31 years old and not pregnant. I'm supposed to do this. Anyone who's ashamed of it, from either side of the fence, needs to buy a vowel.

Says she, all superior.

In fifth grade we had The Talk. Mrs. Vitali had the girls and Mr. LaVecchia the boys, and I wonder what Center School did when the teachers weren't so conveniently gendered? We got the nurse and the charts and the pamphlets but not, as I recall, any samples. I never did find out what the boys got. Certainly not samples. Anyway, Mrs. Vitali's son was in high school in the next building and would occasionally come to the window after his school let out to borrow the car to go play golf. This one day the shades were down so he decided rather than knock on the window and interrupt the movie, just to sneak into the room for the keys.

He opened the door, walking into the back of the classroom, a classroom that erupted into outraged, embarrassed giggles. A classroom with--what was that on the chalkboard! And he still had to get all the way to the front of the room for the keys before he could get out! Out! Out!

An eleventh-grade boy walking into a fifth-grade classful of girls getting The Talk. It's a wonder none of us were scarred for life.

Pamie wrote recently about the Word and the Wall. Ah, the wall. Unlike Pamie's sister, my sister told on me.

A picture from my infancy shows the walls of the halls in my childhood home still free from a hideous paper that haunted it from my earliest memory. A repellent grid of two stylized, ugly flowers, one square and the other round, up and down the stairwell and around all the halls. I suppose it was meant to hide toddlers' handprints and dogs' tailmarks, and it might have done that, but it was ugly.

On the phone with a friend one midsummer morning, I idly filled in the center of one of the square flowers with a pen that lived by the phone. Since it was over my head, I suppose I figured it was above anyone's notice. I wasn't that bright: everyone else in the house but the dog was taller than I.

Just before going to choir one Sunday morning, CLH either noticed or merely decided to tell. From my room, I heard the ruckus--my sister's pointing it out, my mother's shriek and subsequent threats to me upstairs, and then bang! out the door. If my sister hadn't had choir, I'd've been dead right then.

Hasty action was called for--this wasn't a carpool day so I had only my mother's four-mile round trip to the church to eat the evidence like a plate of tarts. I sprang downstairs to see if the dark blue spot really showed so conspicuously against the green brown and orange flower on the off-white field. Yep. It sure did. Okay. I leapt for the selfsame pen and desperately used the ink eraser. It did an excellent job on the ink and also on the color in the paper. Hmm.

Back upstairs for my trusty colored pencils and crayons. I knew Crayola sea green had been a favorite for a reason! Carefully, I sketched a light green circle just about the circumference of the butt end of the crayon. Gingerly, I circled the green with a grey pencil. Hey! Not bad. Now I put in four black dots in a square inside the circle, and presto! I was done. The flower was done. The flower was great! Well, as great as it could be, looking like its fellows.

I took the coordinates of the flower--five down from the stair railing and seventeen across--and retired to my room. Forget butter, ice cream wouldn't melt in my mouth.

My mother came home and screeched for me. Only then did she commence to look for the vandalized flower, unsuccessfully, while I stood by the newel post trying to look as innocent as an unruffled flower. "Well, I can't find it right now," she muttered darkly, "but when I do…"

As far as I know she never did find it. She's not the kind of person who would realize that since the colored-in flower looked enough like the other ones that no one, including an appraiser, would ever notice, and no one, especially a buyer, would give the wallpaper a second glance if they could avoid doing so before tearing it all down, the milk was well and truly spilt and no reason to punish me. If she had ever seen it, she'd've let me know I am sure.

I still look for that flower--five down, seventeen over--whenever I'm in that house. A little victory for obnoxious me.

After supper we drove out for a view of the sunset. "See the USA in your Chevrolet..." We watched the sunset and the thunderstorms brewing from the Cherry Creek Reservoir dam road. This, I maintained, we could have ridden our bikes to, but RDC said he was still breaking in his butt to his bike. To the southeast towered a huge storm cell tall enough still to catch sunlight over the low cloud cover to the west. That low cloud made for another spectacular Denver sunset.

I wasn't sure how to get to the road along the top of the dam by any means but the bike trail, so we ended up finding its west end although we'd set out for the east one. We drove east, looking at the thunderstorm and noticing a bird--a mockingbird? I wasn't sure--fluttering nowhere in the wind coming strong off the reservoir. It kept its wings out valiantly and flapped, but it looked as good as pinned in place. We pulled a U-ee, yooie?, u-turn, anyway, at the east end, and drove west, now looking at the sunset. That damn bird was still there, like Danny's kite.

We found a computer store a colleague told RDC about, and while driving I realized it must be across the street from the prairie dogs. So we've used up the prairie dogs' usefulness. We've taken a left at them and a right and now a straight so now they can be all poisoned, like Celestial Seasonings did to the animules on its property.

There is, by the way, more than one colony of prairie dogs in Denver but this colony always served as a landmark. Left to get to DTC and lisa's pre-Dot Org jobs. Right to go to the vet.

I loved to see the prairie dogs every morning on my way to work. I almost always had to stop at the light and I could watch the little guys poking their noses out to the east, stretching, settling down on their stoops with coffee and paper. They are possibly the only thing I miss about driving to work in the DTC.

Then we were so close that I finally got to show the Koelbel library to RDC. I discovered this library the day I interviewed at Hateful Inc. and I have loved it since. The doorway to the children's room has two littler apertures on either side for littler people. I, as usual, used the kid-sized one. Then I gave the big bear at the table a brightly illustrated book (on ships and sailing) to read--why the librarians don't do this themselves I don't know; I wouldn't want a frustrated bear in my 'brary--and showed RDC the big windows in the children's room and the shelves at the proper height and then the window seats and comfy chairs and reading lamps in the adult fiction reading area and the private teen area and the staircase with its windowseats, since every library should have a staircase and windowseats if it can, and a fireplace. Koelbel has no fireplace.

Decker, a small Carnegie 'brary in Denver has a fireplace and comfy seats but no staircase (in the public area anyway). PGN continues to reign supreme.

Thank the Climbing Tree I put the g in that reign without pausing to think until the u of supreme.

And I showed him the nonfiction stacks on a whole nother floor so the children can be children without being too loud for the adults in the nonfiction, and the murals over the vestibule and over the window seats and so on. And he liked it! He knew better than to say otherwise and I know his preference is for the academic 'brary, but he wasn't lying.

Then we went to the Wild Oats across the street and got two slices of cake and came home and ate them.

Hadn't I just resolved to lose two pounds a week for three months? No more cake.