In the last few episodes you met my mother’s new priest who had decided I was the spawn of Satan.  He (the priest, not Satan or the spawn) was determined to protect my mother from me.  I was just as determined to limit his influence. Read on:

The day after my mother and I received the news that she had about three weeks left to live, she was moved to a care center. I canceled my students and drove to Olympia to see her settled.   When I arrived I found that the priest had checked my mother in and had given his name as the only person to call in an emergency and at death.  I nearly fainted.

“My god,” I thought. “This is a battle of powers and principalities.”

After a long talk with the social worker, the priest’s name came off every form.

“He can visit her all he wants,” I said. “Bring her the Eucharist, pin crucifixes to her pillow, hang garlic around her neck. But he cannot be in the loop.  He intrudes and interferes.”

When I visited my mother in her new room, she said, “The priest wants to talk to you about the funeral.”

“Do you want a funeral?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

I wrote a letter to the priest:

*        *        *        *        *        *        *

Father—

Stop calling me.

Stop ordering me and my family around.

Stop bulldozing your values and opinions into a family you do not understand.

You are making an already intractable situation more painful by your interference and stunning obtuseness to the fact that the relationships within this family do not include you.

My brother and I will not attend and will not pay for any service you put together.

And now I want no further contact with you.

 

*        *        *        *        *        *        *

Reader, I mailed it.

“Anyone who needs a letter like that is probably not going to understand it,” Alex said.

“Do you think he knows what obtuseness means?”  my friend Nina asked.  “You are my favorite confrontational letter writer,” she added

My brother’s assessment was correct. Before long the chaplain at the care center was telling me that the priest wanted to do my mother’s funeral.

“She doesn’t want a service.” I said to him.

“That’s what she told me but she seems to be telling the priest something else.”

“Well, THAT’S BECAUSE .  .  . that’s because.  .  . he is pressuring her and she is anxious and inclined to say whatever will make her less anxious.  She’s mentally ill.”

There. I had said it.  It was the first time I had put it that way.  It seemed the most efficient way to maneuver through the complications.

I thought the chaplain was a bit of a nincompoop but he did have some familiarity with the behavior of the mentally ill. At first I mistakenly assessed him as having actual power in the care facility when in reality he was an overly earnest fusspot.  Still it was a good exercise for me to have one person to not antagonize.

Really, the only clergy I could talk with during this entire episode was the hospice chaplain who was a Unitarian.

“And that’s because you’re not a real minister,” I told him.

He laughed.

What I thought of the care center chaplain paled beside what he must have thought of me after getting an earful from the priest. I knew he was trying to make a decision about where to place his interference units: in my path or the priest’s.  To that end, he asked for a meeting with me and my mother, which I immediately characterized as a trial.

So I brought my counsel, my friend Terry and the most diplomatic person I know. I sat on the bed next to my mother.  Some exceedingly weird young man from my mother’s church and Lisa, my mother’s next door neighbor were visiting.   They remained as witnesses.   The chaplain in his new role as district attorney quizzed me about things the priest had told him: had I actually said to leave my mother in a house with no electricity in the middle of a winter storm?  Had I allowed her to stay alone in her house after coming home from the hospital?

I was uncharacteristically calm as I tried to widen the picture for him: the priest had never asked how he could help with our complicated family situation.  He gave orders to my brother and me with no interest in our limitations as people or of the relational land mines that exist in a family where the mother is mentally ill and the father was an alcoholic.  Neither he nor his wife had accepted my offers to interpret my mother’s behavior or to explain the choices Alex and I had made.  He had bulldozed his way into our family as though he belonged there.

I looked at Terry, the most diplomatic person I know. She knows how to say just about anything without resorting to insult or sarcasm.  She smoothly re-phrased what I had said, making me sound more sane and reasonable than I felt.  She also pointed out that it did not matter what the priest thought or said about me or what stories he may have told about me.  He was not family and he had no authority with which to be interfering.

The chaplain, switching to the role of judge, asked my mother did she want a funeral?

“No,” she said clearly. “I have already arranged everything with Mills and Mills.  I don’t want any fuss.  I just don’t want to be cremated.  I want to be buried.”

“So ordered” said the judge. He looked at me.  “I will tell Father.”

My mother had sat through the entire trial nodding like a Kewpie doll. Finally she asked what we were talking about.

“We’re fighting over your body,” I said.

The weird young man looked askance, but Terry, who knew me and Lisa, who knew my mother didn’t bat an eye.

My mother laughed, “I’m not going to care.”

The chaplain was gathering himself to leave when my mother said softly, “I’d like a small service.”

I almost choked on the hysterical laughter galloping up my throat. I looked at the chaplain and took a deep breath through my nose.  “I told you she would do this.  Just leave it,” I said.

To his credit, he did. I was acquitted.  However, it still was not the end of it. The following week my brother called to tell me that he had just talked with the priest who was still beating his drum about the funeral, hoping to wear down a family member.   He had outlined to my brother what an orthodox funeral entailed– as if this was somehow going to be an enticement. First, the priest expected to be at the bedside when our mother died. He would take possession of the body, and take it to the church where there would be an open casket viewing.  The congregation accompanied the body to the cemetery to say eulogies, throw flowers and dirt, wail and carry on like a bunch of moirologists.  It was an ancient ceremony that must be performed exactly as specified; there could be no deviation.

“Is the family even invited?” I asked Alex.

“If there are people who want to have a service for her, I would like to accommodate them if we can,” he said.

“No one is stopping anyone from having a service. They can do anything they want.  They just can’t have her body to do it with.  What part of No Fuss doesn’t he understand?  I mean, geez, if he talks Mom into this, I wouldn’t go.  Would you?”

“No,” Alex said.

While in theory I wasn’t against such an extravagant ceremony and being a death junkie, I was interested in ancient rituals. I objected to the way the priest was coldly trying to impose it on Alex and me who, to understate it, needed special handling.   At the very least we needed to be consulted.  More pertinently, it was exactly what my mother said she did not want. Privately I thought that my mother would have enjoyed the idea of the fuss, no matter what she said.  It was the expense she objected to.  She wasn’t to know that I wouldn’t have paid the priest a cent.

“I wish he wouldn’t come around so much,” she said to me.  I knew she enjoyed the attention so I interpreted this to mean that she wanted him to stop pestering her.  My mother was too weak and doped up to be any clearer than that.

Under Washington State law, no outside individual can override a person’s end- of-life wishes. But I was afraid the priest, with his constant badgering, would succeed in getting what I was now calling his freak show by wearing down my mother and ambushing her with a notary.   I knew she might okay the funeral just to get the priest to leave her alone.

I was hysterical the afternoon I called Joan, my friend with the theological chops (and sister of Terry, the diplomat.) While I was sobbing over the phone, she looked something up on her computer.

“Write this down,” she said.

“What is it?”

“It’s the name and number of the Bishop of the Eastern Orthodox Church in the U.S.”

I sobered up. This was impressive stuff.

I caught the bishop going into a dinner in Dallas, Texas. He was annoyed at being bothered but he gave me the name of the appropriate hierarchical entity to appeal to.  Within 24 hours I had the most gracious of letters from said hierarchical entity.  He had reigned in my mother’s priest; there would be no further talk of a funeral.  The congregation would have a Panikhida for my mother at a later date.

I was so relieved that I sobbed spontaneously for the rest of the day and all of the next. It was important to me to have won this last competition.  I wanted my mother’s body.  A burial meant something to me and I wanted the ritual.  More than that, I wanted a ritual I designed, not one imposed on me with words that meant nothing to me.

Next: Hospice

 

 

 

The last time I saw my mother in my childhood home, she looked pale and shriveled. When she leaned back and closed her eyes, she looked dead.  She had lost a lot of weight.  Far from being problematic to her, she thought it made her look young and sexy.  She kept saying she felt better because of it. I felt a tenderness; I hated to leave her.

Two weeks later, the voice, loaded with accusation, of the orthodox priest announced on my answering machine that my mother had appeared jaundiced in church that morning and one of his parishioners, a nurse, had diagnosed her with only a few days to live.

“She needs to be taken care of,” he said officiously. It briefly went through my mind to ask him if he was suggesting a hit man.

I found it curious that the priest treated my mother as though she had no will of her own.   When he inevitably found she was inhospitable to his orders, he pressured me to make her do what he wanted.  I alternately felt sorry for him and despised him for this.  I knew he was trying to help and I knew the church was concerned about my mother.  But he had alienated me and I was the only one currently alive who knew how to negotiate the terrain of my mother’s mind.

I called my friend, Nina, and left a message that the priest was on the rampage and I needed some advice.

I called my mother. She sounded frail, but still had her usual belligerency.  I got nothing from her except the acknowledgment that she knew how to dial 911 should she think she needed to, whatever that meant.  Alex did a little better: He talked her into seeing a doctor the next day.

I was dialing Nina again when her car pulled up in front of my house. Nina has a great expression: “No one should be alone at a time like this.”  I played her the answering machine message and we talked about what to do.

I spent the next morning–Monday– monitoring by telephone my mother’s progress from her doctor to the hospital, getting the news along the way that her next stop would most likely be hospice. I knew it was serious when actual doctors began calling me.  I made arrangements to go to Olympia the next day, ignoring the half dozen calls from the priest.  In his last message, he said in dramatic tones that my mother was on her Death Bed and she deserved an orthodox funeral.

“So that’s what’s driving him,” I thought.

My mother had prepaid her own death arrangements: no funeral, no fuss, a simple burial, no expense other than what she had already put out. She had worn me out with reminders.  It had taken the place of her usual repertoire of lectures: don’t talk about menstruation in front of boys and look-at-how-you’re-sitting-keep-your-knees-together.   In the past few years when her memory loss was more acute, I had talked seriously with her about her death and burial as though we hadn’t already been over the material 341 times.

On Tuesday I found my mother in a hospital bed glowing iridescent yellow. She looked like a cartoon character.  She seemed a little dazed, but otherwise perky.  We were chatting when a doctor, a social worker and a hospice worker all walked in and shut the door.  I watched this serious procession and thought, “Wow, this is really it.”

The doctor began by telling my mother she had a cancerous mass that had started in her pancreas but had metastasized all over her body. She had about 3 weeks to live. He fumbled around the actual statement that there was “nothing we can do.”

“You can’t, huh?” my mother said as though we were discussing the possibility of a ride home.

The hospice worker cleared her throat. She opened her notebook and handed me a pile of brochures.  With much rattling of papers, she mumbled to my mother that hospice was there to help her Meet Her Goals.  I was amazed at her display of discomfort, not to mention the absurdity of the language.  I wanted to ask, “Is the goal to die or did you have something else in mind?”

I looked at my mother who was smiling at everyone. I leaned into her.  “Mom, do you understand what they are talking about?”

“No,” she said pleasantly.

I leaned in closer and said, “You’re dying. But it’s going to be like we’ve talked about—fast and easy and so you–” here I started to cry– “won’t feel pain.”

“Oh,” she said. “That’s nice.”  I knew she understood.  She was ready to die.

I looked at the three of them. I wanted to say, “You can go now” but it was their show so I just held my mother’s hand and waited.  They talked to me about hospice.  It seemed that she could go home and hospice would come to her or there was an available bed at a care center down the road.  I told them I thought the care center was the best idea.  I didn’t want to subject normal human beings to my mother’s house.   Also, I couldn’t stand the idea of her being alone in that house, no matter how familiar, while she was so close to death.

She looked a little frightened at the idea that she would not be going home. I told her there would be people who could play Scrabble with her all day if she wanted.

She perked up. “Can we play now?” she asked.

The lab coats left.

My mother gestured around the room and asked, “Now why am I here?”

“You’re dying.” I said

She sat back, smiling, “Oh, that’s right.”

I had spent 53 years trying to make my mother happy. If she died happily while playing Scrabble in the last month of her life, it would do wonders for me as well.

Next installment: Fighting the Priest.

 

 

If you’ve been reading these pieces–cut from my memoir 99 Girdles on the Wall— in order, you’ll recall the 450 organizations my mother was leaking her pension to (The Mail) and the two attorneys my brother and I went through (The Attorney). Never a dull moment:

On another front, my mother’s church was getting involved in her affairs. She was ensconced in an Eastern Orthodox Church, having left the Baptist church where the women were Wiggling Their Bottoms in an Ungodly Manner during the singing of certain peppy religious songs.  The new priest had only been in the parish a short time, and more to the point, had only known my mother for a year.   He seemed remote but I liked him and his wife in the beginning.  I even visited a Good Friday service during one orthodox holy week.

“Is that what you’re wearing?” my mother asked when I arrived to pick her up.

“No.” I said. “You ready? Let’s go.”

“Elena, you can’t wear pants to church.”

“Well, too bad, it’s all I have. You don’t have to sit with me or act like you know me.”

“I have a skirt you can wear.” At that point in her life, my mother always wore the same thing to church:  a polyester navy blue jacket and skirt she had made a lifetime ago and an old veiled pillbox hat which sat on her head like a crumpled piece of newspaper.

“Did you want to go to church with me or with someone else? Because I’m wearing what I’m wearing.”

“Well, it’s not right.”

The small congregation gathered in the dreary upper room of a Lutheran church. The icons were colorful and exotic like the box of Kellogg’s cornflakes in my Bulgarian grandmother’s dark, sod house in eastern Montana.  When I tried to get close enough to inspect the icons, I was politely told I couldn’t be in the Priest’s space.  I sat down.  I enjoyed the service, more for its novelty than anything else.  I had never known anyone to kiss pictures since my junior high years when I kissed photos of the Monkees.  I had never seen people kiss the floor for any reason.

The priest’s wife brought my mother to Seattle to have lunch with me. They were making an effort to get acquainted with Mary.  I felt for them.

“How long do you give them?” my brother asked me.

“Six months,” I said.

I was close. Relations began to disintegrate nine months later and after my mother hemorrhaged a lot of blood and ended up in the hospital.  The priest e-mailed me to say he had visited her and they had decided she would move out of her house into assisted living.  I told him that she’d been a tease about assisted living since before my father died; we were used to her false alarms.  He didn’t respond.

Alex said, “Give her a few days. When she’s feeling better, she’s going to get tired of the priest’s attention and decide she wants to go home.”

That’s what happened. She got a little stronger, the docs said there was nothing conclusive from the blood work, and my mother went home. The priest and his wife were scandalized that we, well, principally I didn’t come down to Olympia and Put Her Someplace.

“Have you even met my mother?” I asked. “You can’t make her do something she doesn’t want to do.”

The priest began a campaign to get her to move. At the same time the church initiated helpful services that kept her more comfortably in her home.  They did yard work and little house repairs.  There was a man on call as her private taxi service to and from church, the grocery store, the bank.  Someone cleaned once a week.

I told my mother she had to pay whoever came in to clean. There was food rotting on the kitchen counter and the house smelled bad.  I had grown up with food rotting on the kitchen counter and I knew that wasn’t going to change.   The cleaner would have to get used to cleaning around it because she would be fired if she threw it out.  I offered to act as interpreter for my mother’s idiosyncrasies and to make sure the house cleaner got paid.

The woman from the church said she’d rather approach my mother on her own without my help. The unchristian, ungrateful daughter. The infidel.  So a perfectly nice woman named Rachel took her five year old child with her when she cleaned my mother’s house for $15 an hour.

“That seems really steep,” my mother told me.

“It’s not,” I said. “I wouldn’t do it for less than $50.”

There were problems from the start and before too long, Rachel was checking in with me.

“She has been questioning me about how much I am charging. She insists I am charging from the time I leave my home, not from the time I start work.  She thinks I am taking advantage of her.”

“It doesn’t mean you are,” I said.

Rachel seemed inordinately concerned about this. She was either taking my mother or her own image way too seriously.

The five year old child sometimes helped his mother with small things and sometimes played with a toy or looked at a book. The day came when my mother only paid Rachel for half her time because her son had not done any work.

“He can’t just sit there. He has to work, too.”  My mother was indignant when she related this to me.

“He’s a kindergartener! There are child labor laws, Mom,” I said. “You don’t want to be hauled down in front of a judge, do you?”

I learned that Rachel was so upset she had fallen to pieces in the priest’s office. The result of this ugly affair was to step up the pressure on me To Do Something.

The priest’s wife wrote to me, “I am getting red flags. Mary doesn’t seem like herself.  You need to be pro-active and decide as a family what you are going to do.”

I read this with amazement. I wondered first about her idea of family and the assumptions that went along with it.  Did she think a family was a standard issue item and all families operated similarly?  I wondered what she imagined we could do.  These people scarcely knew my mother.  She was behaving as she had for the 52 years I had known her. I didn’t see any red flags.  She seemed exactly like herself.

“Why don’t you tell her that it’s God’s will that she move out of her house?” I asked.  I was serious.  I thought that ploy might actually stand a chance at working.

“We can’t make up God’s Will!”

“Of course you can.  You do it all the time.”  This earned me no points.

I mused over the idea that we own our own lives. We make them what they are.  My mother was 88 years old.    There she sat, alone in a gigantic house full of junk, three refrigerators stuffed with food, some of it there since I had lived in the house.  She walked with a cane.  She was losing weight, looked frail, and seemed woolly-headed.    Aside from the aging, she was no different from the woman I had grown up with.  She was out-spoken and demanding, but also generous and kind to people who weren’t family.   I had come to think of her as disturbed, yes, but also a wily survivor; skillful at manipulating people, and capable of making life hellacious for everyone within 50 miles of her until she got exactly what she wanted.

My mother wanted the life she had. How prone people were to imposing their own notions about what would be a better life for her.  However an assisted living facility might have improved her life –and there’s no guarantee it would have– the discomforts and hazards of her home were preferable to the terror and disruption of going someplace new.  I was her only champion in this and I came to see it as a way of being respectful of her as a human being, something she had never been of me.  It was a way to love that I had not learned from her.

There were also practical considerations: Undoubtedly her living at home was more convenient for me.  All the work and responsibility of a move and subsequent interventions on her behalf would have fallen on me.  I was already exhausted and had my own health concerns and limitations.  And it meant money stayed put for the time being.  I was all for that as well.

Alex had a different set of worries. “What if she gets her meds all mixed up or stops taking them?  What if she falls?”

“Well, what if she does?” I said. “She is going to die one way or another. Maybe she’ll die from a fall while living exactly how she wants to live.  She could fall in a nursing home, too.”

For a while we ticked along. The priest and his wife pressured my mother to move. Their church made it possible for her to stay in her home.

My mother demonstrated her mettle when she told the priest, “Leave me alone. You are treating me like I don’t know anything.”

At least this is what she reported to me.   She also told me that the priest’s wife was stealing money out of her purse when she went up for Communion.  I listened without commenting.

My mother’s last Christmas came early when she got to pull her church, her neighbors, her children and what friends she had left into a turmoil over what to do when the electricity went out in her house during a regional storm on the Thursday before the holiday. On Saturday, my brother got a call from the priest’s wife saying they had Mary with them but could not keep her after Tuesday as they had family coming in.  What should they do?  I got a similar call on Monday.  I called back and left a message that I had choir performances all week, my mother was allergic to my cats, my back was going out (pretty much as I was speaking) and there wasn’t anything I could do.  Weren’t there other parishioners who could spell them?

This was so unacceptable that the Big Guy, the Priest Himself called with the same question: What should they do?

I found this odd. Why weren’t they asking Mary what she wanted to do? Why wasn’t my mother doing the calling? Either she had gone into her Helpless Act and they were falling for it or she had said what she wanted to do and they were trying to over-rule her.

Since I had made the mistake of answering the phone when the priest called, I said, “There’s nothing I can do.”

“Well, I understand that there’s nothing your brother can do, he lives so far away, but you .   .   . You know we’ve had her for 5 days”

I wanted to scream, “I’ve had her for 52 years!” but all I said was “There’s nothing I can do.” This was what they taught you to do in assertiveness training.  Keep repeating the same phrase even though you are about to crumple onto the floor with muscle spasms and anxiety.

“The thing is, she is your mother.”

I nearly turned inside out with rage. I wanted to say, “Hey, buddy, don’t even try that manipulative guilt shit with me.  I was raised by the Master and you aren’t in her league.”

What I did say proved to be problematic for me down the road, “Take her home, light a fire and call social services.” And to redeem myself for the sarcasm, I added helpfully, “Or a hotel.  That’s what a lot of people are doing here.”

He hung up on me.

I was shaking. Then I thought of her friends, Marie and Radcliffe. I called them, explained the situation and miraculously, they said she could stay with them.  They said they would arrange it.

Radcliffe said, “I don’t think it’s safe for her to be living alone.”

Sweat was pouring down me. I could feel it in every crevice of my body.  Was there no one who didn’t think it was all up to me to do something?  But I didn’t want to alienate anyone who might help.

“Probably,” I said as evenly as I could.   “But my mother is going to do exactly what she wants no matter what anyone thinks.”

“We know that,” Radcliffe said quietly.

I was so encouraged by his tone that stuff started spilling out of me, “She has her Helpless Face that she puts on when she wants someone to do something for her; she is capable of making everyone miserable until she gets her own way and she has undone everything Alex and I have done to help her be safe.”

“We know that, too.” His quiet voice on the other end of the line sounded like God.

I started to cry. “Thank you for saying that.”

“We feel badly that you and your brother are going through this.”

By the next morning, electricity had been restored to most of the city. Instead of going to Marie and Radcliffe’s, my mother went back to her home.

Alex called me that night to fill me in on a telephone conversation he had just finished having with our mother: She had wanted to go home after 24 hours of being at the priest’s house.  She had been bored at first, then furious because she felt trapped.  There was more:  His home doesn’t look like a priest’s home.  He doesn’t act like a priest.  He goes around in his socks.  When she was growing up, the priests were devout.

I started to laugh. So now the priest was on her shit list.

A few months later, Alex called me from California to say that our mother had been visited by social services. He was using his fussy-wussy voice and I thought, “Oh god, what now?”  I thought that at least once a week.

“The priest reported her.”

“Are you sure?”

“Who else could it have been?”

“Well,” I thought. “The priest finally listened to me. He called social services.”

“So now she’s in The System,” Alex fussed. “And there’s this thing where They can go in without telling us and do things for her and then They get paid out of her estate after she dies and They don’t tell us.”

“Ah, geez. What’s the number?”  I had no idea what he was going on about.

The next day I had a very nice chat with Hilda who explained the federal COPES program for which my mother did not qualify. She then went through her visit with my mother point by point, and finishing by saying that Mary was far from being incompetent or unable to live alone in her own home if that was what she wanted.

Hilda recommended trying to introduce some help with cleaning, maybe a panic button, and some support in the bathtub. We talked about ways of making these ideas palatable, even attractive, to someone as stubborn as my mother.   It was a relief to talk to someone who did not advocate bull-dozing the elderly For Their Own Good.

I asked Hilda if she was going to pass this information on to the person who reported my mother, and she said no. And that was the last we ever heard of social services.

My brother had actually called social services once while my father was still alive and my parents had a rodent infestation. My father had insisted on trying to trap the vermin but he was losing the war.  The basement smelled foul, the rest of the house almost as bad.  My parents had told us to mind our own business when we tried to help.

“They have RATS in their basement,” Alex said, wanting to impress on the government worker that it was scandalous to live this way.

“Really?” was the reply. “How big are they?”

I took my friend Joan to Olympia with me one day. Actually, she asked to come. I call Joan my friend with the Theological Chops.  She has a master of religious education from Loyola University.  Her thesis was in Geriatric Spirituality.

She and my mother took a shine to each other and by the time we left, they had arranged for Joan to go back and do what no man or woman had ever been allowed to do, not even my father: clean out the upstairs refrigerator. After this job was completed a few weeks later, there was mending and other small things.  I couldn’t have been more pleased.  And with my new access to the family revenue, I could pay my friend for the work.

Unfortunately it was not the last of the priest. I recognized that for the priest to have called a government agency, the entire church was probably no longer coping with my mother’s situation. It’s a pity that he couldn’t have extrapolated enough to find some empathy for my brother and me who had been trying to cope with her for over half a century.  I would have given anything to have had more support but the priest was in the business of giving orders, not listening to the concerns of someone who actually understood the situation.  In his intrusion into our family, he was in over his head and hadn’t the humility to recognize it.

Unfortunately it was not the last of the priest. Stay tuned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the second in a series of stories that were edited out of my memoir 99 Girdles on the Wall.  It’s still good stuff!  If you are dealing with aging parents, may you feel less alone as you read it.

After my father’s death, my brother Alex and I hired an attorney to help us sort out a dubious piece of legal work that my parents had set up. They had been under the impression that they had a Trust. They had used, at my mother’s insistence, a “Christian” lawyer—this being the only qualification that meant anything to her. The lawyer had gone both out of business and out of state and the Trust had all kinds of problems.

The new attorney was a mismatch from the first. Mrs. Pilson was our mother’s, not our family’s attorney, a distinction we didn’t fully appreciate when we hired her. We thought it was the best choice given the level of distrust between my brother and me. Mrs. Pilson was solicitous of Mary and had private sessions with her, sessions that gnawed at Alex.  He was suspicious of what was happening to our inheritance in those sessions.  I felt reassured that with this arrangement at least he wasn’t the one diddling me out of my share.

Before the private sessions the four of us met together in Mrs. Pilson’s office. These sessions were uncomfortable at best. Mrs. Pilson talked down to us.

“Now you both love your mother and want the best for her, so let’s all pull together here.”

Alex and I peered at her through the prisms of our perceptions and both of us got stuck at the word love.  Our family was complicated; I’m not sure we knew what love meant.  We wanted The Best for all of us but there was a lot of contention over what that was, too.

Mrs. Pilson treated us as if our mother was the only one grieving. I deeply resented this.

“Your mother just lost her husband!” she said when Alex and I slid into an ancient feud of one sort or another.

“We just lost our father,” I said. “Who the hell do you think you are talking to?”

Mrs. Pilson took everything our mother said at face value. In a discussion about her check writing activity that was siphoning off her pension and social security, she told Mrs. Pilson she had stopped writing checks.  When confronted with her check register and check carbons, my mother said someone else was writing those checks and that she would call the bank about it on Monday. Mrs. Pilson embarked on a Serious Conversation with our mother about this, impressing on her the need to budget her contributions.  Then she turned to us and announced that she felt that Mary understood.

We stared at her incredulously. Was she serious?  Mary had completely snowed her.

“Mom is probably asking her for stamps right now so she can mail the checks in her purse,” Alex said as we waited in the car for Mary to come out of her private session. This struck us both as so absurdly funny that we were still laughing when our mother joined us and asked if we were talking about her.

Except for a brief dip into shock right after my father died, my mother wasn’t any different than she had ever been. She had always been unreasonable and had always needed to be right no matter how ridiculous the righteousness she was embracing.   Everything my mother did was an attempt to neutralize the anxiety which accelerated and decelerated according to her own strange wiring.  If you were to accuse her of having brown eyes –which she had—she would deny it because she would be responding to the threat implicit in your tone.

She played people. She told them what they wanted to hear privately and denied it when it suited other purposes.  She formed attachments with one by pitting him against another.  She had always done this.   I had always seen her with a child’s eyes and had tried to align myself with her.  Now I saw that she was really quite disturbed.

My father had absorbed my mother’s craziness just as my mother had lived with his drinking. The two of them managed to live their secret lives, never missing a day of work. They were active in church and in the world outside the house.  The only casualties were my brother and me.   With my father gone, my mother was displaying to the world the woman we had always known.

*       *       *       *       *

I lobbied hard for the POA since I lived several hundred miles closer to our mother, was going to be doing all the work, and was better than Alex with red tape.   No one listened to me.   Alex, especially, was like a dragon on his gold with that POA.  He wanted the piece of paper.  He didn’t want the responsibility, the work or the headaches that went with it.  In fact, he didn’t even realize there was work, responsibility and headaches.  I thought it was reasonable that I have the power that I needed to get things done.  No one else thought so.   He was older and he was The Male.

I went from begging to demanding that Alex use the POA to do something about our mother’s bank balance. After numerous trips from California to Olympia and phone calls with someone at the bank where it sounded like he principally chatted her up, Alex finally set up an account into which he could siphon money from the account my mother was pissing away.  Then he couldn’t bring himself to actually use it.

“People are watching us!”  He told me “We have to be careful.”

This was so unexpected a response that I took it seriously for a while. “Who is watching us?”  I asked

“People in Olympia. Her church.”

I thought about this for months. It sounded very weird, but he was still my older brother.  I still wanted him to know more than me and to take care of things.  Gradually and under protest, I came to the conclusion that I was the grown-up in the family.  I had always wanted to be the Saviour.  Well, here was my chance.  It wasn’t how I had imagined it when I was ten years old.  It wasn’t fun at all.  And nobody thanked me for it.

We had never had a good relationship, Alex and I, except for briefly during his first year in college. He came home on breaks and we listened to Bob Dylan records.  His personality expanded at my interest in his life at college.  Then he stopped coming home and I took over his old bedroom.  He resented that.

I visited him a couple of times after he moved to California. I thought we had some good times together.  When he made trips to Olympia, I thought we had some fun.  I did impersonations of our mother that would amuse him and soon we’d be laughing about incidents that had not been funny when they happened.  Those times felt good to me.

But Alex never made any effort towards developing any rapport with me. He responded occasionally, but never initiated.  I had the impression that he didn’t think he participated in his own life.  Things just happened to him for no reason.   He might have enjoyed the times with me but it didn’t occur to him to make an effort towards making them happen again.

After our father died, we tried e-mailing to get better acquainted but that didn’t last long. It was too hard and we were too far in arrears.

When I am in a charitable frame of mind, I describe my brother like this: He is an artist.  He plays the piano by ear –beautifully, enviably.  He is a potter.  His pots are amazing in their imaginative delicacy.   He thinks like an artist.  He has that messy kind of mind that is a pile of ashes from which a phoenix arises.  He can be very funny and very crass.  He approaches life in a gullible, guileless way.  I feel like Machiavelli next to him.

*       *       *       *       *

One thing all three of us –my brother, my mother and me–agreed on: We didn’t want the attorney in our lives.  My mother didn’t see why she needed any kind of attorney.  I realized too late that we would have been better served by someone who represented all three of us.  Alex disliked all attorneys on the belief that once you hired one, they convinced you that you needed their services for other things.  That was what had happened with Mrs. Pilson.  She worked out the Trust situation and then stayed on as an expensive advisor.

No one had heard from Mrs. Pilson in three months when one day she e-mailed my brother to ask how Mary was doing. He wrote her a long letter and sent it to me to see if I had anything to add.  I advised him to shorten it to one sentence and tell Mrs. Pilson we were doing fine.

“She is going to bill us for the time it takes her to read the letter, you know. We do not have to report to her and we don’t need her permission to do anything.”

Sure enough, a bill for $150 came to my mother. Mary understood immediately that her attorney had done something she hadn’t authorized.  She erupted, refused to pay the bill and fired the attorney.

From this episode, I took away the idea that my brother needed a woman to tell him what to do. I decided that I might as well be that woman.  I set about doing whatever I could that didn’t require a POA.  Quite a lot, I found out.

I got my mother on automatic bill pay and got her an unlisted phone number. I ratted her out to the DMV and her driver’s license was revoked.   I got in the habit of checking a little pile of stuff she kept next to her seat on the couch to see if there was any small fire I could put out.  This is how I discovered that she was just about to cash in an $80,000 annuity and give it to Jerry Falwell.   I put a stop to that by telling her that the government would take most of that money in taxes if she cashed it in now.  She was always ready to believe this line. I took the paperwork and told her to call me if she ever heard from the annuity company.

My mother didn’t figure out that she could get a listed phone number again. I told her she needed to let her friends know what her new number was but she didn’t make that effort.  As a result, I think she felt lonelier and sank further into her world of playing solitaire and watching religious TV.   She stepped up her complaints about my not calling her.  Here’s a conversation I had with her 254 times:

“Why don’t you call me?”

“You could call me when you want to talk.”

“I don’t know how to dial the phone.”

“You just did.”

“But there are too many numbers. It doesn’t always work.”

“I can set up a simpler long distance so you don’t have so much dialing.”

“Oh no, that would cost too much.”

“But you say you can’t use the one you are paying for now.”

“Elena, did you take that stack of magazines I had on the end table?”

Every so often she and I talked about her death. We went over the arrangements she had made with Mills and Mills Funeral home.  “I’ve paid for everything,” she told me repeatedly.  “I don’t want a funeral.  I don’t want you kids to have to worry.”  She looked at me wistfully and said, “I hope I am not going to be a lot of trouble when I die.”

I looked at her wistfully and said, “I wish you weren’t so much trouble now.”

On the rare occasions when my brother drove up from California, I made the three of us sit down and talk about what our mother wanted. I made her write statements of the things she said to us:

“I want to live in my house as long as I am safe and able. My preference is to have someone come in to help me do things rather than move.  If I have to move, I want to stay in the Olympia area. I want my children to manage my money when I am unable and to take over ownership of the house.”

I made us sign the statements. Sometimes I insisted we get them notarized.   We’d make three copies so everyone would have one.   They were of no legal value but they made me feel better.  They soon became known as Those Papers Elena Makes Me Sign and my mother used them as coasters.

“You know she’ll say something different tomorrow,” my brother said after one signing session.

“All the more reason to document something that is also okay with us,” I said.

There were some things she said consistently. I had this conversation with her 587 times:

“Mom, do you want to move out of your house?”

“The priest thinks I should.” Smug little smile.

“Do you want to move?”

“Not really.”

The trips to the bank to get things notarized were always difficult when my brother was along. He and I had the following conversation 82 times:

“What are we going to do if she makes a scene in front of the notary?”

“She’s not going to make a scene.”

“How do you know?”

“Has she ever made a scene?”

“She almost did, once.”

“She never has when I’ve been there. If she does, we’ll just handle it.”

“No, that’s not good enough. We need a plan.”

“OK, here’s a plan: Forget the whole thing.  We just won’t do it at all on the off chance that she might make a scene in front of the notary.”

“No, we need to get this signed. I drove all the way up here to do this.  She just better not make a scene.”

*       *       *      *       *

While my brother worried about what people were thinking, I worried that my mother would sell the house for a $3 bill to the first con artist that came up the front walk. And I worried that she would make another dive for the annuity money.  I was furious that my brother was still clutching the POA.

I told him, “If I had it, I would be throwing it at everything to see how far it could help in saving her from herself.”

One day I called him. “I’m going to see an Elder Law attorney in Seattle about our situation. You can be there on a conference call or you can come up and be there in person or neither.  Here’s the date and time.”

I had learned it was best to just tell Alex what I was going to do, to not give him options, and to not negotiate. He came.

Peter listened to our story and recommended we put the house and annuity in our names. He picked up my list of the 450 money-soliciting organizations my mother was supporting.

“I’ve been at competency hearings where something like this was Exhibit A,” he said.

He went over all the legal details with us and we divvied up the work. We needed change of ownership forms and the deed to the house.  I took the house and Alex took the annuity.  Peter said it would be better if we could do everything without resorting to the power of attorney.  I said I could talk my mother into anything.

I took the Quit Claim to Olympia, collected my mother and made a scene-free trip to the bank to have it notarized. Peter filed it. Done.

In the same week, Alex ran into all kinds of problems. First he wanted to know who was beneficiary of the Richmond Family Trust.

“We are,” I said

“But she was the beneficiary when Dad was alive.”

“Well, he’s not alive. We signed that non-judicial trust resolution thingy.”

“I think Mom is the beneficiary.”

“Of her own trust? That makes no sense.  She can’t benefit after she dies.”

“I want us to ask Peter.”

“We are not asking Peter. He charges $450 an hour.”

We asked Peter. He said, “Your mother cannot be the beneficiary of a trust that was funded with her assets.”

We paid his bill.

“And Alex has the POA,” I fumed to myself. It might have been funny.  It wasn’t.

Then my brother called the annuity company and managed to antagonize them to the point that no one in their office would talk to him.

“What did you say to them?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “I told them I had the POA and we needed the forms for a change of ownership.   They said I had to send them the POA for their legal department to look at before they would talk to me again.  Now when I call to see how it’s coming along, no one will even speak to me”

“Give me the number.”

“They won’t talk to you. They have to confirm the POA.”

“We’ll see.”

Within half an hour I had talked to the annuity company, downloaded the form we needed, had filled it out, and it was in the mail for Alex’s signature. I tried not to gloat when I told him.

“It must be because I’m a man,” he said.

“Look,” I said. “You don’t trust anyone.  When you are suspicious of people who are doing their jobs, they smell distrust in the atmosphere, and they naturally think that you are the dishonest one.  So they decide they need to scrutinize your POA.”

“Did they ask you for the POA?”

“No, I didn’t mention it. I just said I needed some forms.”

This conversation advanced us not at all. It just made Alex more suspicious of me.  He was sure there was something I wasn’t telling him.  I was shortly to give him something to not trust me about.  Something that would set us back months.

The annuity company never did confirm the POA.   I took the signed change of ownership form to Olympia, collected my mother and took her to the bank.   While we were there, I set up a second account with hers and my name on it, and a place for Alex to sign.  I arranged to have all but $800 a month directly deposited into the joint account and all statements and check orders to go to me.  My mother signed everything while chatting happily with the bank manager about her years as a first grade teacher.

Then I whipped out a POA form and had her sign me on. I wanted to be ready in case something came up when there wasn’t time to dick around with Alex’s paranoia.  I hoped I would never need it – I had managed without it this far– and I hoped my brother would never find out.

My father had wanted to be cremated and had not wanted any kind of service when he died. My mother was against cremation for religious reasons having to do with The Rapture, but she didn’t make any attempt to have my father buried.  The presence of the urn, though, in her house, was distressing and she fussed about “that thing.”  Alex and I had agreed we would scatter the ashes someplace in Puget Sound; he wanted it sooner, I lobbied for waiting.  So there the urn sat, bothering my mother until I finally took it home with me and put it in my closet.

“I’m glad we finally got that taken care of,” my mother said.

*       *       *       *       *

I had my own private ritual a few months after my father died. I took my bicycle to Walla Walla, stayed in the Whitman College Alumni guest room and bicycled all over town with a little bag of cremation remains.  I left little pinches at places where I knew my father had been:  the house on Alder street that my great grandfather had built;  Sharpstein school, the Phi Delt house, the bandstand at Pioneer Park, the house on the corner of Park and Alder that now houses the Red Cross.

And finally Mountain View cemetery. I sat by the graves of the grandparents I had never known, the ones that died when my father was so young.  The engravings on the headstones were worn and dirty.  I cleaned them off and dusted them with the cremains.  The ashes made the letters shine:  Charles A Richmond.  Louise Knott Richmond.

“I came here to tell you that your son has died,” I said to them, and then burst into tears.

*       *       *       *       *

Months after we had put our mother’s estate in our names, Alex and I took the urn to Ellisport Lagoon on Vashon Island where the Richmond boys used to summer. We didn’t tell our mother.  She thought “that” was already “taken care of” and I saw no reason to drag it all up again with her.  We spent the afternoon talking, wading in Puget Sound, and watching the wind take the ashes.  It was a lovely afternoon.

So it was a pity that the next morning Alex went to the bank to sign onto the account I had set up and found out I had swiped the POA out from under his nose. The ensuing phone call was ugly and ended with me screaming, “Oh, get over it!” and hanging up.

I wish I had told him up front rather than hope he wouldn’t find out.

Next installment: The Priest

 

 

 

 

 

When I was working on my memoir 99 Girdles on the Wall, my editor blue-penciled several chapters about the end of my mother’s life.  He said they sounded crazed and angry. Crazed was the word my analyst used to describe me during that time as well.  The legitimacy of anger and crazy feelings aside, I went back to have a look at my words to see if I could make them more entertaining.  I don’t like to waste a good story:

The Mail.

The entrance to my mother’s house in the last years of her life involved tunneling through boxes of unsorted mail, towers of envelopes leaning precariously off end tables, and stacks of letters creating a nest for her on the long sofa where she sat for hours watching religious television and drinking coffee. She lived for the mail.  She read every word of every letter of every lobbyist that ever set up shop this side of legality.  She believed everything they said.  She believed them when they sent screeds on stapled sheets of paper saying they couldn’t afford envelopes.  She believed them when they told her that she was losing her civil rights at the hand of the Democrats who were secret Communists.  She believed them when they said Hillary Clinton, personally, was siphoning off her social security.  She believed them when they told her that if Puerto Rico was allowed to become a state, the English language itself was in jeopardy.

Some of the political solicitations came dressed up like urgent telegrams. (I had to admire the savviness of this lure.  People my mother’s age associated telegrams with urgent news.) Some called themselves “legal documents” and were stamped “Time Sensitive” and “Do not Tamper.”  Some had important sounding returnees like “Public Advocate of the United States.”   They issued meaningless membership numbers and asked for membership dues with warnings about what would happen to America if their organization failed in its mission due to –at this point in the letter they were on a first name basis—Mary’s lack of support.  They sent membership cards and cheap promotional items: umbrellas, key chains, pens, T-shirts, personalized pads of paper.

They asked for “pledges” of $7 (a study probably found the elderly more likely to send $7 than some other amount because a lot of these borderline criminal organizations asked for $7 pledges.) My mother sent her $7 pledges. Two weeks later, the telegrams reminded her of her pledges and asked her for more.  Since she had short term memory loss and the word pledge meant something to her, she sent more checks for $7.  Two weeks later, Pete and Repeat went back to the lake. Except this wasn’t a kid’s joke. My mother was giving away $1500 a month, over half her monthly income, to unethical scum, many of which used the same mailbox number in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

The religious ones were just as bad: “The Atheists are on the march. Help me reduce my debt so I can fight them.”  Envelopes came with Bible verses on the outside and tales of the imminent apocalypse on the inside.  These appealed to my mother because she believed in The Rapture. She and my father had an on-going fight about The Rapture, a word that does not appear anywhere in the Bible.  My father said it was a made up event, worthy of Hallmark. My mother insisted it was a Biblical concept exactly as annexed to the Bible by John Nelson Darby in the 1800s.  The pertinent thing about The Rapture in my family was its source of conflict.  It was weekly entertainment for a while.

My mother believed that Jesus was coming soon, though she was always canny enough to not give a date. She intoned the line from Revelations about “wars and rumors of wars,” and stuff about weather patterns changing.  She commented regularly that the clouds looked different.  She had never seen clouds like these in her life.  Somewhere was a cloud focus group assembled just for her.

All the solicitors: religious, political, medical, charity—sent pages of hyperactive, alarmist verbiage, every second paragraph in caps and every third paragraph in italics, and the summary in red, italic caps.   She thought the letter writers were her friends and she looked forward to hearing from them.

Then there were the sweepstakes. Once she responded to their mailings the organizations tagged her as a viable address. Then they accessed her phone number.  One day I came in the front door and intercepted her on the telephone.

“Elena,” she said excitedly, “I’ve won a million dollars!”

I grabbed the phone away from her and yelled into the mouthpiece:

“Put this number on your Do Not Call list!”

“But, ma’am–”

“Put this number on your Do Not Call list!”

I hung up.

“Why did you do that?” My mother looked hurt.

“Because you didn’t win anything.”

“How do you know?”

“Because no one ever wins anything!”

Another time, my brother intercepted her in the parking lot of the Tumwater Safeway with $700 in cash, ready to hand over to someone who needed it to process her million dollar win.

She gave out her banking information to strangers who lured her with fictitious wins. I had her bank account changed so many times the bank said that if it happened again, they would drop her as a customer.   My brother Alex and I hoped that would happen.  Six months after my father’s death, more of my mother’s synapses must have started firing because the sweepstakes activity stopped being a problem.

Every time I visited, I sneaked as many boxes of mail out of the front room as I could manage. When my mother went to the bathroom, I got at least two out to the car, leaving another sitting on the front porch waiting to be transported.  If she happened to see me with a box, I got very good at whisking them quickly away, calling over my shoulder something like,

“Oh this is that stuff we went through last time, remember?” Or “These are some of my books, good grief, don’t be such a snoop.”

My sporadic visits didn’t make enough of a dent in the mail. One Sunday while my mother was at church, a few of us from Seattle descended on her house and sucked out every piece of mail we could find.  We piled the boxes into my neighbor Gwen’s VW bus, floor to ceiling and filled the trunk and back seat of another car.  Then I slapped the vehicles on their rumps and sent them back to Seattle while I stayed behind to take my mother to her church’s harvest festival where she had to make nice with me because the priest would be watching.

She was furious but she didn’t say anything except, “You went into my bedroom!” She was angry with me for the SWAT raid until the day she died.   She complained to her friends, her priest and to my brother. “Elena took everything away from me.”  That was her line.

The mail continued to be a problem. I arranged a change of address.  All her nasty mail started being forwarded to my house.  I spent hours going through it, partly to make sure there wasn’t anything important, partly out of fascination, and partly to document the solicitors.  The final tally of criminal organizations my mother had been sending money to came to over 450.

I contacted all of them at least once. I ticked off the number of times I mailed or called to have her name removed.  It was fatiguing. When I was up late, feverishly and determinedly trying to gain control over the mail, I started writing letters that said things like, “Yo, man o’ God.  Take my mother’s name off your fucking mailing list.”

I learned that often you had to send a stop mail request to an address that was hidden in the fine print and pale type on the back of a page of the mailing.   I also learned that some of that mail was not going to stop no matter what I did.  Eight years later, I am still getting mail addressed to my mother.

The business with the mail was a species of the lifelong competition between my mother and me. I was going to win this one though I didn’t know what exactly I thought I would win.  Did I think that if I got every single solicitor to stop sending their mailings, I would gain control over my mother’s finances and through some intricate alchemy of money and value, I would finally have a mother?  I wasn’t thinking at all.  I was obsessed.

My mother reversed her mail.   She waylaid the mailman at the neighbor’s house one day and filled out a change of address card.  Soon she was hearing from all her friends again.  On alternate days she felt she was drowning in mail.  She asked me to make it stop.  I told her it was her own fault.  I had helped her once and she had taken it all back.   She received this in silence.

A few weeks later, she asked me again.

“Why don’t you ask Phyllis Schlafly to come help you?” I asked. “After all, you are sending her money.   You think she’s your friend.  Maybe she’ll help out.”

The third time it came up, I said, “OK, look. I will help you with your mail.  But that means it has to all come back to my house.”

“OK,” she said.

I made her sign a statement saying: “I want Elena to help me get the mail under control.”

I filled out a change of address card and signed it with a POA I had forced her to give me.   Before long, this came in the mail from the U.S. Postal Service:

“Dear Ms Richmond:

We have instructions from Mary K Richmond to deliver mail to the old address on the change of address card. Without legal documentation proving you have permission to forward Mary’s mail to you, we are unable to comply.  It is a felony to fraudulently submit a change of address without the legal right to make decisions for that person. . . etc.”

Taped to the letter was a note in my mother’s familiar handwriting, full of underlines and explanation points saying she wanted all her mail delivered to the Olympia address. The main reason I saw red was because I knew I had walked into this one with my eyes open. I knew I should have made her sign the change of address card but I wanted to use my new POA.   It was all part of the competition with my mother.

I was still steamed when I dialed her number. “Do you see what you did?  Do you know what a felony is?  People go to jail!”

“Elena, did you take those plastic forks I had on the dining room table?”

“DID YOU HEAR ME?”

“Yes, I heard you. Did you take those forks?”

By the time she died, she had managed to amass as much mail as we had once sucked out of her house and I had to start all over again.

Stay tuned for “The Attorney.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is nothing as sweet as the calm after the source of anxiety has vacated the premises. In reference to my current situation, I believe the skunks have moved on. It was news to me that skunks could live in residential areas of a city when I first smelled them last spring. I came home from OK Chorale rehearsal to the unmistakable odor of skunk hanging around my front gate. I say unmistakable because I have no patience with people who say that skunk smells like pot. It doesn’t.

My only previous experience of skunks was when I was a child growing up in Olympia. My parents had just purchased their first new car, a Rambler three-on-a-tree. We left home early for Wednesday night prayer meeting at Tumwater Evangelical Free Church in order to take a little celebratory spin in the country. Sitting in the back seat and all of eight years old, I’m not clear about exactly what happened. There was an animal in the road and the car swerved. The new car smell was replaced by an ascending odor accompanied by my mother screaming hysterically. We trooped into church reeking of skunk and with an obvious prayer request.

The skunk odor around my gate last spring was mild. It was mild a few weeks ago when I started noticing it again. Then came the evening when I stepped out of the sun-room to get the cats in for the night and the odor was so powerful that if it was pot, there was an entire Grateful Dead audience in the cemetery storage lot on the other side of my fence. If that wasn’t cause enough for anxiety, there was Freud, my orange and white cat who still smells like Kitten, sitting atop the fence and far too interested in something in the lot below. Fortunately he stilled smelled like Kitten when I finally got him in a few hours later.

I assumed that the skunks had taken up residence in the cemetery. The next day I went up to talk to the caretaker. Skunks were news to him. He hadn’t seen any evidence of skunks. Rats, raccoons, opossums. No skunks. But then skunks are nocturnal and he tried to not be in the cemetery at night. Whether this was out of superstition or because like any of us, he preferred to not have to work overtime, he was a dead-end of information.

The next evening, George, another orange cat in the neighborhood got spooked and ran up to the top of a telephone pole where he nestled comfortably amongst the open wires. Julie, his person, knocked frantically on my door to ask if she could get some cat treats from me. I came out with little green fishes for George and some Paul Newmans for Chester, Julie and Cory’s little chihuahua-ish dog. George and Chester regularly take their passeggiatta down my street. George likes to climb a neighbor’s old dead tree and have a little cat meditation. While he’s doing that I sometimes chat with Julie and Cory and feed Chester.

Anyway the upshot of George’s race to the top is that a bunch of us sat out under the telephone pole until well after dark, at which time City Light showed up to cheerfully effect the rescue. The guy rode up in the little elevator and pried George away from the electric wires. Just as the box began to descend, George took a flying leap out of the man’s arms and attached three of his paws to the telephone pole. Gasps all around. The prying process was repeated and George was finally restored to safety.

It’s what Julie told me during our vigil that is pertinent to my skunk story. She told me that she had smelled skunk in the neighborhood.

“It smells like pot,” she said.

She also filled me in on a house across the alley from me, which belonged to a family of hoarders. I knew the couple vaguely. I knew they owned several beat up cars. I even let them park one of them on my parking strip for a period of months. I knew their yard was unkempt. I knew they owned a vicious dog that sometimes got loose, crapped in my yard and aggressed toward me when I tried to shoo it out. I occasionally ran into them at the grocery check-out. They were odd. They seemed wary of me in the way that kids who have just spilled their milk are wary of grown-ups.

Apparently they had moved and someone had bought the house for re-development. I don’t know how the couple decided what to take and what to leave behind but when the excavators arrive and started pulling the place down, it was still full of stuff, some of it in packed boxes taped up and ready to move.

I started thinking backwards. The skunks had not always been here. I’ve lived in my house for 17 years without ever suspecting there could be skunks in the city. So the skunks arrived, this couple moved. Was that the order? Maybe the couple moved and then the skunks arrived. Either way I suspect the skunks found shelter and a feast of garbage and dog food; they were in clover, so to speak, all summer.

Then the excavators arrived and paradise was invaded. The skunks started moving north in the direction of the cemetery and my house. The day the wrecking ball came I strolled over to talk to the guys. In answer to my query, one of them said he had smelled skunk.

“Naw, it was pot,” the other one said.

The noise of the house being pulled down has made my cats jumpy. I suspect it has dislocated quite a bit of urban wildlife. Significantly, the Grateful Dead concert appears to have moved on. But I am still sniffing the air obsessively when I gather the cats in at night.

 

 

 

 

 

It’s difficult to choose a “favorite” Dickens novel. What I can say is that I’ve read Bleak House three times. It begins with the fog surrounding the Chancery law courts:

“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among tiers of shipping. . .Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into cabooses of collier brings; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships. . .”

and with a lawsuit over a will –Jarndyce and Jarndyce– that has been going on for generations:

“This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means. . . Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, without knowing why or how; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world.”

The fog and the lawsuit surround the characters and provide a structure for all that takes place:

Esther Summerson is plucked from her aunt’s house to be a companion for Miss Ada Clare at Bleak House. Esther’s mother, ill after the birth, was told her baby died. Esther’s father, James Hawdon– a sea captain allegedly lost at sea—is actually alive. The two were never married and it’s a huge disgrace for Esther to have been born at all as her caregiver continually impresses upon her. The mother, the father, and the now grown Esther are adrift in England, unaware the other others are alive.

Esther’s mother went on to marry an aristocratic old fossil named Sir Leicester Dedlock (don’t you just love the name Dedlock? Gee, I wonder what kind of mind he has) and has been depressed ever since, ensconced in Lincolnshire in a house called Chesney Wold, which sounds as damp and gloomy as it is. Sir Leicester’s affairs are assiduously and jealously looked after by the misanthropic solicitor Tulkinghorn. Under the guise of professional concern for Dedlock family, Tulkinghorn nurses a sadistic fascination with Lady Dedlock. The scenes between them are creepy.

James Hawdon now addicted to opium, supports his habit by law writing, i.e. copying legal papers. Hawdon copies an avadavat that finds its way to Chesney Wold via Tulkinghorn. Lady Dedlock recognizes her lover’s distinctive handwriting and faints. Tulkinghorn is immediately suspicious and sets out to find the law writer with the distinctive handwriting. He finds James Hawdon who now goes by the name of Nemo (Latin for “no one”) in his lodgings above Krook’s rag and bottle shop. There’s a bit of a problem, though, in that Nemo is dead from an overdose of opium. Mr. Krook who has shown Tulkinghorn to his lodger’s room, secretly pockets the rent he feels is owed him as well as a bundle of letters tied with a pink ribbon.

Someone else is curious if not suspicious: “a man by the name of Guppy,” the legal clerk of the law office that looks after Jarndyce vs Jarndyce. Mr. Guppy is curious about Esther Summerson, thinking she might be a suitable mate for him. Because of his infatuation, information about Esther sticks to him like lint. Thus he comes across the information that her correct last name is Hawdon. He sniffs out that there might be some connection between Esther and Lady Dedlock. Stumbling about in the dark with these fluffs of intuition he asks Lady Dedlock if she might be interested in a packet of letters found in the lodgings of the law writer’s room.

Lady Dedlock launches her own surreptitious investigation. Jo, a small homeless boy who was befriended by Nemo and who gives evidence at his inquest, is an unwitting conduit of information between all interested parties and is rewarded for it by dying of smallpox. Lady Dedlock disguises herself as her French maid and seeks out Jo to serve as a guide to her dead lover’s former insalubrious lodgings and to his pauper’s grave.

At this point we are about a tenth of the way through the book; I’ll spoil the plot for you in a minute. I have omitted about 15 secondary characters, all of them worth the reading of the book. To quote from Mary Gaitskill’s introduction to the Modern Library Classic edition, “Dickens is excessive like Nature; like living things his creatures must twist and turn, expand out or tunnel in until they have utterly fulfilled what they are.” Each time I have read Bleak House I’ve gotten attached to a new secondary. This time it was the Smallweed family.

The Smallweeds are a family of small time crooks related to Krook of the rag and bottle shop who famously dies by spontaneous combustion, a bit of gratis trivia that ought to come in handy at some time in your life. When Krook dies, the Smallweeds take over his business and become protective of the bundle of letters tied with the pink ribbon that a lot of people seem willing to pay a lot of money for.

The patriarch of the Smallweed family is a “baleful old malignant” with almost no muscle tone and who continually bleats, “Shake me up!” whenever he has slid “down in his chair since his last adjustment, and is now a bundle of clothes, with a voice in it. . .” Someone is usually available to pull him up and plump him like a pillow so he can more comfortably renew his spews of venom.

Mr. Smallweed is belligerent with everyone. To his wife he “discharges the cushion at her, crushes her against the side of the chair, and falls back into his own, overpowered. His appearance after visiting Mrs. Smallweed with one of these admonitions is particularly impressive and not wholly prepossessing. . . because the exertion generally twists his black cap over one eye and gives him an air of goblin rakishness. . . All this is so common in the Smallweed family circle that it produces no impression. The old gentleman is merely shaken, and has his internal feathers beaten up, the cushion is restored to its usual place beside him; and the old lady. . . is planted on her chair again, ready to be bowled down like a ninepin.”

Now I’ll spoil part of the plot: Late in the game, Lady Dedlock realizes that Esther Summerson is her daughter. They meet once in a heart-rending scene in which Lady Dedlock tells Esther they can never meet again or acknowledge one another. Lady Dedlock is not a particularly admirable character but she is compelling because she is a woman depressed from the constrictions of society without the recourse of reading Betty Friedan. She doesn’t love Sir Leicester but I think she is fond of him. She is not prepared to risk the security of her position with the announcement that she has a love child.

Tulkinghorn picks up the scent. By paying off, brutalizing and threatening quite a number of people, Tulkinghorn puts together the story of Lady Dedlock’s life, and her connection to Nemo and Esther Summerson. He threatens Lady Dedlock –and takes quite a sadistic pleasure in it—with the information. Should it ever come out that Esther Summerson is Lady Dedlock’s child it would ruin the great Dedlock family of Chesney Wold. This is his stated position but clearly Tulkinghorn is also interested in imposing his power on other people for no other reason than because he can.

So it’s not surprising that one day his clerk finds him shot to death in his lodgings. At this point the story becomes a murder mystery. Enter Inspector Bucket of The Detective who is the first detective in English fiction. He’s a decent man, full of good-will, who just happens to take note of absolutely everything.

He solves the murder. I won’t spoil that part of the plot. Nor will I say what happens to Lady Dedlock and Esther. If you don’t want to read the book I highly recommend the PBS production with Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock , Charles Dance as Tulkinghorn and Alun Armstrong as Inspector Bucket of The Detective.

At the end of Part One, I was crying on my kitchen floor, wearing a respirator mask and talking to an opossum with eyes as big as silver dollars who was under the house along with a family of dead rats:

March 28
A beautiful, warm day but all that means to me is that the stench of putrefaction will be ever more powerful. I cancel my students and spend the day in the garden.

Pete spends the morning setting traps and sealing the house. He tells me there is no evidence of an opossum and no possible way for it to get in unless I ushered it in the front door, but he’ll trap for it anyway. He is re-assuring, answering all my questions patiently even when I ask the same ones over and over at regular intervals. He pulls several bags of insulation and a rat body out of the vent under the kitchen but the stench remains.

Cook fish.

March 31
Though I didn’t think it possible, the stench in the kitchen is worse. Another rat must have come home to die in the arms of its loved ones.

Wills’ piano lesson. Someone drops him and his mother off and speeds away. For the first time in eight years Esther is without a car and comes into the house.

Wills says, “You’ll have to blow out those candles because my mom is allergic to the smell.”

I start to sweat. Noticeably.

Esther says, “Never mind, I can wait in your sun-room.”

“You can’t,” I blurt out. “There’s. . . well, you see, I’ve had a teeny problem with a rat and there’s trap out there.”

“Oh that won’t bother me. He won’t come out while I’m there.”

“Okay, look, you can’t go back there. There are dead rats under the sink and it vents to the sun-room and the place stinks and you can’t go back there.” I burst into tears.

Pop corn and cook fish.

April 3
Pete checks the traps. The only animal—dead or alive—under the house is a small mouse who licked the bait off all the traps until the last one sprung.

“Here’s your opossum,” Pete says.

I’m confused. The dirt-dobber described something with eyes as big as silver dollars that hissed at him. Pete says the guy probably got claustrophobic and imagined the rest.

Pete grows a halo and stigmata appear on his hands.

April 4
Playboy and company show up three hours late. They mercilessly tease the fellow who looked at a mouse and saw an opossum with eyes as big as silver dollars. I give him a soda, thank him, and think the rest of them are better specimans for Becky of Neanderthals than those of us born at Maynard Hospital in the 1950s.

The guys resume work digging a tunnel to the kitchen.

In the middle of piano lesson with Sarah I hear the Playboy say, “What another one?” Sarah struggles to the end of “Frogs on Logs” and blood drains out of my face.

The guys pull six corpses out from under the kitchen sink bringing the total to eight and not counting the skeletons.

I leave For OK Chorale rehearsal. When I come home, I put my key in the lock and hallucinate that a six-foot rat is inside, lounging on the sofa with the TV remote and refrigerator left-overs, and entertaining an opossum with eyes the size of silver dollars. Inside it’s just Edith, fit to be tied that I won’t let her into the sun-room and feeling defrauded of the most engrossing fun she could have had in years.

April 9
The house feels like a mouth whose teeth haven’t been brushed in a month. Hire Lynette to help me clean. Turns out she can’t work with me. I “interfere with her energy.” I set a cassette to record “Car Talk” and spend the morning in the garden while Lynette pushes a rag around, smearing the dirt and insulation dust. She vacuums the entire house on the wrong vacuum setting with a bag that needed to be emptied and seems quite put out when I point out that the vacuum hasn’t picked anything up. She piles all the dirty rags in a heap on the oak table, forgets to do the bathroom, and leaves with Christian rock blaring out of the radio. Reminds me of a character in a book who turned out to be a psychopath.

Call Sunshine Carpet Cleaning. A female voice answers with a menu of options. I choose to schedule an appointment. All operators are busy and I’m put on hold. After several minutes, a male voice tells me to leave a message for Dirk, which I do.

Sarah’s mother calls to say that Sarah doesn’t want to take lessons any longer.

April 13
Drive to Bellevue to teach a class. Pop in my cassette of “Car Talk.” In the middle of a caller’s story about a car trip after her husband’s vasectomy, the tape vreeps into Christian rock. My hands lock onto the steering wheel and I almost crash into the bridge divider.

April 20
Hire Sharon to help me clean. She spends three hours on the kitchen and bathroom and gets all traces of insulation dust, dirt, and grime removed. Not wanting to interfere with her energy I spend the afternoon cleaning the sun-room and leveling the pile of bricks that the rats have used as a walk-up to the broken window. Neighborhood cats come expectantly with their lawn chairs and leave in disappointment.

April 21
One of Hitler’s youths shows up to clean the carpet. It’s not just the blue eyes, the blond hair and the German accent. It’s the lectures I have to endure about how I abuse my carpet. Dirk from Sunshine Carpet Cleaning is a one-man operation in a battered station wagon with ancient rug cleaning equipment. There are no employees, no secretary, no dispatcher, just a very complicated intake system. He energetically cleans the carpets and I cower in the garden.

May 1
I finally feel like I have my home back. The house smells sweet and clean.

May 15
There’s a skunk smell somewhere in the yard. There can’t be skunks in the city.

Feb 5
I hear scratching and scurrying sounds in the ceiling above my bed. It must be birds on the roof.

Feb 10
I find a pile of sunflower seed shells dribbling from a bag of bird seed in the sun room. Outside the door is a fat squirrel innocently nibbling under the outdoor bird feeder. He’s the prime suspect.

I get a notice from the Post Office saying my mailbox is in an impossible place and causing intractable and unreasonable hardship to the mail carriers. Since my mail box is three feet from the road on a fence post, I don’t understand this.

I call my branch office, which can only be reached by calling national headquarters in Washington D.C., which connects me with my branch a mile from my home. A pleasant tenor voice tells me that because of the way my car is parked, the carriers have to put their carts in reverse and this is illegal. My options are to move my mailbox or park a block from my home, ceding the entire parking strip to the mail carriers who aren’t allowed to back up.

He tells me that my mail will be held for me until I move my box and that I have to give back all of last week’s mail. But this is a joke. I think.

Feb 24
Becky calls to talk about how homesick she is for New Orleans. She proceeds to denigrate everyone who has had the misfortune to be born in the Pacific Northwest and who hasn’t the wherewithal to either rise above their miserable lot or move. I ask how her psycho-therapy clients respond to that paradigm. No comment.

Feb 27
Neighborhood cats bring over lawns chairs and Mai Tais and spend the day lounging outside the sun-room door. Occasionally one gets up to paw and sniff around a pile of bricks. Edith spends hours crouched by a crack in the wall.

Chris and Wills come with their mother to help move the mailbox. They fight over who gets the post-hole digger and for how long. I time them—five minutes a turn. We move the mailbox just in time for today’s mail, which the mail carrier can now deliver not only without going into reverse but without even leaning over onto one buttock.

March 8
Early morning I watch a large rat strut across the sun-room floor as though his name was on the mortgage. I open the door. He pauses insolently. I make a loud thump and he scurries off but I haven’t the presence of mind to mark where he goes.

I immediately depart for the hardware store, still in bedroom slippers, to get rat poison. I understand that the poison makes them thirsty so they wander to the edge of one’s property and fall face down in a puddle of water in the neighbor’s yard. I have never seen this phenomenon but I don’t question it. Put bedroom slippers in garbage.

Mail not delivered today.

Becky calls. All Seattlites are Introverts, something that ranks a little above slug. We are social Neanderthals who don’t know how to have fun or make friends. She is going to write a scholarly book on the subject. I suggest that she doesn’t find me unfriendly and that it hurts my feelings to hear my home, family and friends being criticized so viciously. This surprises her.

March 14
No more scurrying sounds. No more sightings. However sunflower seeds now being extracted from fresh hole in bird seed bag, which I had moved to what I thought was an inaccessible place.

Yesterday’s mail comes today with little handwritten notes on four envelopes saying that mail was undeliverable because mail box was blocked by a car. It would have taken less time to walk around the alleged car than it did to scribble the notes.

To Die Fledermaus with Eleanor. Opera is charming but as Eleanor says, a little Strauss goes a long way. We go in my car and I forget to give her back her handicapped parking sign.

March 15
I fuss about the parking sign. Eleanor says not to worry. Her car is inoperable and she’s stuck at home for at least a day. Library lot is full and I am salivating to get the Anne Perry on hold for me. Pull into the handicapped spot, put out the sign, and limp theatrically into library.

John across the street and I agree to split the cost of a load of compost. We decide to have it delivered in front of my fence, well off the parking strip that is reserved in its entirety for the mail carrier.

March 20
Smell emanating from kitchen drain. Scrub out the sink. Pour vinegar and baking soda down the drain. Scrub out garbage cans. Scrub cupboard below the sink. Dust with soda, sprinkle with bay rum. Odor is noticeably stronger.

Becky calls with fresh tirade brought on by having arranged to meet someone for coffee and the two of them sat in two different Starbucks waiting for the other to show up. This somehow reflects upon the social skills of anyone born in the Pacific Northwest. I say I won’t listen to any more criticism but would talk about ways to help her feel more at home here. Long pause. She appreciates hearing “where I am.”

I am certain the rat I apprehended in the sun-room has died under the kitchen sink. There’s a clearance of only eight inches under that part of the house. I make a few tentative swipes with stick through the sun-room air vent but lose heart.

Ask Eleanor to come over with moral support and a hoe. Burn incense and essential oils all over the house.

March 25
The stench is staggering. I find a listing in the yellow pages with “RAT ODOR?” in caps. The voice on the end of the line is reassuring. Within the hour, Pete from Excel pest Control shows up to inspects the house, the sun-room, and the yard. He tells me that rats seldom work alone. They have families.

“Well I’ve only seen the one,” I say confidently.

Judging by the number of tracks, Pete estimates there are at least two families under the house. I feel blood drain from my face. He watches me and doesn’t say any more. I tell him about the scratching sounds above my bed. He goes to inspect the attic. I am sitting down, taking deep breaths through my nose when he comes back with a report that there are several more families in the attic. This information does not register at all.

“How did you come to have this job?” I ask chattily.

He answers all my questions matter-of-factly while my mind whites out, comes back, and whites out again.

“I’m sure there’s just the one rat,” I repeat.

He looks at me for a long time.

We walk outside and the fresh air clears my mind. We settle on a time for him to set traps and to seal the house. He sprays some vicious pine-smelling stuff into the vent under the sink. I spend the rest of the morning trying to find someone to remove all the contaminated insulation and to dig out a crawl space under the sink.

March 26
Wait all day for the compost to be delivered. At ten o’clock in the evening John calls to say the garden company wrote down the wrong address and couldn’t deliver but will come first thing in the morning.

Cook Chinese herbs while wearing a respirator mask.

March 27
Ten cubic feet of compost is delivered at 5:30 in the morning and wakes up the entire neighborhood. Next door neighbor calls to say she is having major surgery that morning—just wanted me to know. I run over to see her off.

Becky leaves a message. She is calling to say goodbye to our “friendship” and comments that I, in typical Seattle introverted Neanderthal fashion, am not picking up the phone so she has to get her closure by leaving a message. I intercept the call but she tells me she doesn’t see any point in talking and hangs up. I crawl into my cave, make grunting sounds and suck on my greasy hair.

Edith is beside herself wanting to go into the sun-room.

Contractor and a couple of workers show up two hours late and start on the insulation. Contractor is wearing a cap with a Playboy bunny logo and I look at it while he goes over the contract.

He says, “Now if there’s anything you want us to do or not do, just say so.”

I consider asking him to not wear that cap while on my property but decide against it.

My first student arrives. The guys have begun to explore the areas under the kitchen. They decide they need trench digging shovels. The Playboy goes off to Army/Navy. I ask the dirt-dobbers to please not make any loud announcements once I start teaching. They both smell as bad as the dead rats but I am very, very nice to them and give them sodas and ice tea.

Late afternoon I hear a shout and a lot of thumping. The guys pack up hurriedly. Evidently there is an ancient rat civilization complete with burial grounds under my kitchen sink, but they had only managed to pull out one skeleton. The Playboy tells me gravely that there is a live opossum with eyes as big as silver dollars under the house and he can’t let his men finish the work until all live animals are gone.

I burst into tears. That night I sit on the kitchen floor with a respirator mask on and talk to the opossum. I thank him for choosing my home and ask him to please go away now. I burn sage all through the house and don’t sleep very well.

END OF PART ONE

You know sometimes you hear a noise in your house that you can’t identify? But one cat opens an eye and another one yawns. The third lifts his head up, but none of them summon a sense of danger or even curiosity. And so everyone relaxes. An hour later you find the shower curtain has crashed into the tub where you have an inch of bleach water, bringing with it the black skirt you had drip drying on the rod. And you think, “oh that must have been that noise.” And you’re so relieved that you’ve located the sound that you don’t think to castigate yourself for leaving your (favorite) black skirt so close to its mortal enemy til much later in the day.

There was a noise like that a few weeks ago, I’m sure of it. Now that the season is turning and the windows aren’t open as much, there have been a collection of such noises. I haven’t gotten them all catalogued yet but I did think I had identified one such noise last week.  As it turns out, it’s still a cold case.

The story begins with a different kind of house noise: the one I’ve been hearing for a few months. It’s a ticking sound in the ceiling above my bed. Sometimes it wakes me up at night. I know the sound of wasps in the wall and it wasn’t like that. I know the sounds of rats in the walls and it wasn’t like that either. So for a long time I told myself it was nothing. Crows maybe, picking at whatever they could find on the roof.

But the other night when it was chilly and we had our first rain in weeks, the ticking activity accelerated to the point that I knew Something Was Going On that couldn’t be ignored any longer. In the morning I did an inspection tour on the north side of the house and sure enough, there was a swarm of wasp activity at an air vent. Inside the house I slid open the door to the attic crawl space, which happened to be conveniently located three feet from the air vent that was providing the wasps their summer rental. A wasp came ambling toward me and I slammed the door shut.

“My god, they’re in the house!”

My voice was about two octaves higher than usual when I talked to Eden Pest Control but they re-assured me that what I was describing was not unusual. The only unusual thing was the amount of money it would cost to have them come out to neutralize the situation. They came within two hours. These guys are great, by the way. I think that a calm, matter-of-factly demeanor must be part of their job description. Enjoying the rescue and the sense of being a savior doesn’t hurt. I know two people in pest control who are Sagittarians.

After checking the outside, my savior inspected the attic. He shone his flashlight inside, then crawled in and had a good look. He emerged looking calm and reassuring while I sat on the stairs making hash of the inside of my lip.

“What I am going to do is spray the outside of the hive with a transference product. It’ll get passed around the hive until they all die. I’ll be back in two weeks to follow-up and when I do, it would be a good idea to remove the rat you’ve got up here.”

I felt the blood drain right down to my toe-nails and I started babbling.

“There’s a rat? There can’t be a rat. How did a rat get up here? I haven’t smelled anything. It must be from a long time back.” Like that mattered.

“It doesn’t look all that old.”

“My god. I set that trap fifteen years ago.”

“It’s a good thing you did.”

Aw geeze. There’s been a dead rat practically above my bed and I don’t want to finish this sentence.

But this is where I linked up one of those unexplained noises. Somewhere in the recesses of the last month there was an odd thump, I’m sure of it. It was the trap springing while my cats yawned. Or rather, the cats that bothered to wake up yawned. It turns out that was wishful thinking and that uncredited noise now exits the story.

What happened next is that I got to obsessing about the rat. I wasn’t going to wait two weeks to have it removed and I most assuredly was not going to crawl in and get it myself. I’ve removed dead rats from behind refrigerators and stoves and have scooped up body parts in the yard with a shovel but the truth is that I am rather phobic about rats and I did not want to go after one in a dark enclosed space and then have that memory to torment me. I don’t know why I feel I need to justify myself. No one would want to do it, not even a Sagittarian.

I asked my neighbor to do it. Not my neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything and who actually is a Sagittarian–I need her for too many of her specialized skills as it is—but my lovely, lovely neighbor, Bill whose little cat I adore. He didn’t look especially pleased to be asked, but he was very nice about it. I sat at the top of the stairs, looking like I do when the phlebotomist draws blood– that is to say, gazing in the distance– while Bill Went In. He reported that the rat was very light, suggesting that it had been up there longer than just a few weeks. A fresh helping of horror cascaded down my spine. How long have I been sleeping with a rat corpse above me while my useless cats hogged the bed?

I revisited the origins of my rat phobia by re-reading a piece I wrote in 1999 called “My Journal of a Plague Year” and decided it was time to buff it up and publish. It was written on a typewriter so I have to re-type it into the computer. Stay tuned.