The End of This Blog

What I saw: another tick stuck in my leg.

What I did beforehand: I had a memorable mother’s day, with some of my kids around and a lot of time in the yard. The next morning I found the tick.

What I did:  about ten days later I woke up with a high fever, with intense body aches. I went to the doctor and she ordered a lot of blood tests, which were negative. She concluded I had the flu. 

I felt better after about 4 days and resumed my life.

Things that were sad: I was sick again with fevers and body aches a week after that.

I went back to the doctor, who re-ran some bloodwork, which was still negative, but somehow in my bleary-eyed limpness we managed to agree that we should treat it like it was Lyme,  and I started a course of doxycycline. 

By the time the June horse show rolled around I was still light sensitive and feeling sort of ok but not 100%.

How I napped: there had been a good chance I wasn’t going to make it to the show at all and so when I did make it there I took each day as carefully as I could. Saturday I had two classes, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and in between I had horse-show breakfast and stopped in my car to put something back and it was breezy and delicious there so I opened all the car windows and took a nap in my car. As I dozed I listened to the sound of horses walking on pavement. Sunday my schedule was the same, with a class first thing and then another six hours later. I was, in fact, going to be the last to go from our barn, so I knew everyone was waiting for me. 

Where I sat: my last test was Level 1, Test 1, which I've only done a few times. We started out fine, but when I asked Hado to lengthen his canter he kind of blew me off, so I had to get after him. The second canter lengthen was much more like what I’d asked for. And, in between the canters I started to feel we were riding the test, not just trotting at X and cantering again at C, but connecting the pieces. And doing it together, not me sitting on and steering a bicycle/horse but both of us as a unit.

Why I cried: when I halted and thanked the judge, I felt a wave of relief and gratitude.  A week before it didn't seem like I'd be able to show. A year before we weren't doing this level. 

A couple of years ago, Hado was kicked in the knee by another horse and had to spend several months doing nothing but stand in his stall. We didn't know if he'd heal from that. When he was cleared to start walking around he had lost so much muscle in his top-line I compared him to a sweater that hung too long on a hanger. It took two years to get him completely back in shape.

And a few years before that I had taken on the challenge of learning to ride him believing he was too much horse for me, and worried that it might not work out.

So after I turned and headed out of the ring, I thought about how great it is to have a horse to learn on, what a privilege to have the time and money to go to shows, what a joy it is to have a partner like Hado, and how a lot of things conspired to stop us but we kept going. I started to cry.

Who was waiting for me: P., one of the grooms at the barn, came along as an extra pair of hands at the show. She had water, and she listened with understanding when I had something to tell her. 

What it is: this is the last post of this blog. All of these posts (except this one) and all future posts can be found at another site. 

Why this blog is ending: the new site is on Wordpress, so I will be able to add features.

Things that are (a little) funny: when I interrupted my regular writing to take a class, people noticed, and asked. When the class ended, I was out of the habit of writing and posting and had trouble re-starting. 

Things that are not funny: I promise to try to keep blogging. Please come with me.

All time page view stats, as of this writing

Who should see it: you. Thank you for reading this blog. In the beginning, you went to Italy with me. You came with me to find treasures in my basement. You ragecooked with me. You read about my pets, my  headaches, my neighbors, and my childhood. You read about the Bacon Provider and my kids. You read about the plays I saw. You got a fuck-ton of my opinions. Some of you found typos. Some offered words of encouragement. Some of you make me think that someday I really will get around to writing a book (or three). 

What I saw a few days after I got home: a photographer (and friend) caught me as I finished at the show. When she posted this photo on her Facebook, I didn't immediately recognize myself. I didn't even recognize my horse. What I did see was the story, captured in a moment. And I just happened to know the story.

Three Trolls

I’m gonna start by talking about what I mean by “troll.” Sure, the word has its origins in Scandinavian folklore, and I can recommend a book. Real, old school trolls that turn into stone in daylight are much better than today’s trolls. You wanna tell me what you think trolling means, go make your own blog post, or comment. Whatever. I think I might have an inner troll, and she’s hectoring me already.

The term “troll” comes from the fairly recent past, but those early days of the Internet, that feel like now, but it really wasn’t, because then the Internet was, you know, just for porn,  sparsely populated by the denizens of the specific-interest message-board; from those boards it sprang, this term. It means “A deliberately provocative message board user.”

Specifically, for me, more simply, it is a person who tries to make other people mad.

Though my older brother and I are close now, I am pretty certain that he was my first troll. I do remember we played well together, but I also remember that as soon as he started elementary school (and I didn’t), I was rejected for bigger, smarter, faster-running school friends. Friends who could catch and throw. Friends who were cool. I was also rejected for being a cry-baby. In my family, teasing was constant. It was an expression of love, perhaps, but here is my evidence: I gave my brother a concussion when I hit him over the head with my shiny new baton, driven to the deed by rage from teasing. And then. Having been punished and won the damned thing back from my parents, I did it again.

My second troll was the M-boy, who lived near my grandparents, in our neighborhood. On a good day, I was terrified to walk to school alone, and the M-boy made it so I was even more terrified to walk home. How long did I endure the bullying? I can’t say. I don’t remember anything that he said, but I do remember a bird’s nest being found and thrown at me. In the infinite wisdom of the late 60s/ early 70s, the solution to this bully was to keep him after school an extra 15 minutes every day so the rest of the kids could get a head start running home. I guess I wasn’t his only target.

When the M- boy died in an accident at his home, just a few years later, I took delivery on the twin feelings of relief that this bully would never bother me gain, and of guilt for not being sad about someone who was really, actually now dead.

I have resisted writing about my third troll, because, just as I struggle with my latest troll, who occasionally plagues me on Twitter, I worry that writing about it will give the troll exactly what she was looking for.

My third troll (so named for the purposes of this essay) and I were friends in high school. We had the same first name and a similar last name. We’d started in 9^th grade we were in the same crop of new kids brought in at 9^th grade. We hung out. Talked on the phone. Passed notes in French class. I spent the night at her house a couple of times. We rode her parent’s tandem bike in her neighborhood and got chased by a giant, angry poodle. I watched her cat Daisy steal a whole piece of fried chicken off the dinner table and was impressed. I’d never seen a cat steal a whole piece of fried chicken off the dinner table before.

At my highschool, there were many privileges afforded to seniors: a special lounge, a special parking lot, senior prefecture, electing a Mary and a Joseph to pose in the tableau at the highlight of the school Christmas Pageant. On Halloween, seniors got to wear costumes and no one else in the school had this right.

 

Glee Club, Halloween, 1980. Only seniors could wear costumes 

I don’t remember what I wore, though I may have spent four years planning it. What I do remember was that my same-named friend came as me on Halloween.

It wasn’t a complicated costume. She wore socks that matched her turtleneck, and a tiny side ponytail in the front of her hair, with matching ribbons. You could say I was a walking target, dressing like that every day.

I used part of my precious free period to use a pay phone and call my mother. She was even home. I was upset. I was always upset about something, but I didn't usually call my mom. She told me, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”

I hung up, resolved to be cool about the fact that I felt mocked. In retrospect, I would describe the feeling as being trolled.

To the face of my same-name friend, I laughed. Maybe my eyes didn’t laugh, but I did.

Years later I dreamed I was having a swimming party at the house I grew up in. Everyone I had ever known was there: my cousins, my friends from college, my favorite TV actors. My same-name friend showed up with a machine gun and sprayed the place with bullets, shooting everyone.  It seemed real.

Pussy

We picked up our young dog from the trainer and he’d given her the nickname, “Quinny.” Back in those days, the Mythic Times, when software monopolies had hot and cold running spigots of money, when we had perfect house in the city and a farm on an island, we had a dog trainer who trained dogs for Seattle’s rock stars and lived on his own archipelago. He had a PhD in psychology and a rapid-fire banter full of references to E.P.A. Superfund sites and Shakespeare. There aren’t many people I’ve met who I had to struggle to keep up with verbally but talking to him was like the one mile of the Boston Marathon I ran in the 80s with my dad: I had to go as fast as I possibly could just to keep up.

I had to look up this word, “quinny.” And it was maybe 2000 or 2001, so I would have started in our Oxford English dictionary, where I thought I’d find it between “quinnet” and “quino,” but it wasn’t there. Imagine my surprise when the Internet told me it was an Elizabethan term for “vagina.” It’s also a baby stroller company; take that for what you will.

Crude terms for vagina also include “cunt,” “twat,” and, the primary insult of my childhood, “pussy.” Being a pussy had nothing to do with the other meaning of pussy, as in cat. Being a pussy was being a sissy, a weakling, a coward. “Wuss” was a variant on “pussy.” When my older brother teased me into an unsoothable rage, I wrote his name and “IS A PUSSY” in huge letters inside my closet. It was still there when my mother sold the house. Being a pussy was the One Thing we tried hardest Not To Be. It was the sine qua non of screamed insults you could hurl from a passing car, with or without mooning.

Since I was a known cry-baby, I was, de facto, a pussy. I am still a cry-baby, and a huge pussy, avoiding difficult, mildly stressful tasks like calling the dry cleaners to yell at them about my lost Rag & Bone scarf, or balancing the checkbook (two months overdue), or going to the dermatologist for the annual mole check.  I cry when other people get bad news, when I talk about people who’ve been mean to me, or in riding lessons when it goes especially poorly, or well.

Now that I have been empowered by my beloved Internet to embrace my real qualities, and to own my pussiness, and tell the sissy-haters that, baby, that’s woman-hating bullshit nonsense, I’m just gonna shed public tears about Mike Brown and Eric Garner like a real proud, pussy.

Things I Find in my Basement #37

Back when I still had a house of my own, I also had a basement. 

The police came about a noise complaint

In 1988, as now, we were renters, the Bacon Provider and I. We lived in Burlington, Vermont. 

On June 19, 1988, we played Pink Floyd's "Time" as loud as we could. It was a record we had. Back then, we played records, and we made cassettes to play in the car.

Someone nearby must have called the police on account of the noise.

I remember thinking this was all pretty funny.

These days, we have a storage closet in the basement of our apartment building, and we have to go down there to "take out" the trash. There is a fellow who lives down there who looks and sounds and seems a bit like Young Sideshow Bob. He seems to be about the age we were in 1988 when we played music too loudly.  The sounds we hear coming from the basement of this building are mechanical;  Pink Floyd's "Time" would fit right in.

I think Young Sideshow Bob also smokes in the basement because the smell of cigarettes comes up into our bathrooms late in the morning when most people have left for work and the building is quiet. We usually see Young Sideshow Bob when he goes outside to smoke; he stands next to the building, or sits on a low wall there. This spot outside our building is visited by many people, and serves as the Crying Lounge for the McDonald's employees who work around the corner. 

My very first paying job, outside of babysitting, was working the night shift at an Arby's in the late 1970s. This was my opportunity to learn that I was actually a "white" person, and I learned how to count change, to punch a clock, and to smoke. Even though I wish the folks who work at McDonald's would go someplace else to smoke or have words with each other or talk on their phones, I do understand that working the register at a fast food joint is hard and sad and worth complaining about.