Puppy love

I was on vacation in a department store called Woolco.  In the hardware section I found several puppies for sale.  The owners sat bent up inside the tiny cages offering their puppies through the open door to passers-by to try out.

I cuddled with a tiny tortoiseshell puppy; it had a miniature husky face and soft triangular ears.  After returning the puppy to its owner-cage I resumed shopping.  But I could not get the puppy out of my head.  I stalked the hardware aisle twice more, trying to resemble someone innocently shopping for light bulbs or screw drivers.  My heart soared every time I was able to verify that my puppy was still there.

After shopping I was due at a barbecue .  Inevitably I turned every conversation into a story about the puppy.  The puppy was so cute.  The puppy's fur was soft.  Did they want to see a creeper snapshot I'd stolen of the puppy when the owner wasn't looking?

Finally two of my friends insisted that I either shut up or show them the puppy.  We drove to the store.  I wasn't sure which floor I had been on when I first found the puppies; I scoured the first floor with no luck so we went up a flight of stairs.  We walked every puppy-less aisle, then returned to the stairs.  They were dotted with orange traffic cones so we had to swing and hop our way back down to the first floor.  No success; swing hop back to the second floor.  Search for puppies.  Still nothing.

I started to panic.  I couldn't find the puppies.  Finally I found two hardware displays that had flanked the puppy cages.  All sign of the puppies were gone.  I burst into tears.  My friends said I was foolish and that clearly this was a sign that I was not ready for a dog.

Shipping containers and med students

I park my van on a narrow gravel driveway next to Repurposes, a condo complex made of shipping containers.  My friend Craig comes out of the first house and waves me in.  "I'll make tea," he says, disappearing inside, while I wrangle my two cats out the side door of the van and in through his front door.

Craig starts the kettle and then opens the back door.  Both cats shoot through before I can say anything.

"They are indoor only," I begin, but Craig interrupts me, reassures me that his is a completely fenced yard.  He points through a small porthole to a skinny strip of grass with tall fences on both sides.  But the fence stops short of the ground and as we watch, both cats wriggle under it easily.

"Oh.  Sorry," says Craig.

I rush to open the back fence gate.  My fluffy orange cat is at the bottom of  a cliff; I have no idea where the other one is.  I call and he climbs towards my voice.  The cliff begins as a shallow slope at the bottom but the incline is negative by the top so that it is a mild overhang.  I have to close my eyes as the cat negotiates his way back; it's too nerve-wracking to watch.  I scoop him up at the top, heart pounding, eyes still shut, and shut the gate.  I stroke him and he feels sleek.  Opening my eyes I realize this is a short-haired black cat.

I leave Craig's.  It's darker now.  I've parked my van much farther away than I thought.  The neighbourhood seems much more urban.

I walk under a freeway underpass and a medical student in scrubs steps drunkenly from the passenger seat of a parked rusting car.  He's frantically emptying a hat onto the ground and somehow I know to hold my breath even before feces begin raining from it.  He takes a few steps then vomits copiously on the ground from the stench. 

I pass a sleeping bag with two bodies sleeping head to toe.  The bag is unzipped in the middle, so the heads at each end are covered but two mirror imaged white naked pelvises are exposed.  I wake exhausted, scared, and sad.

Househunting on the brain

I pull into the driveway of the farmhouse.  It is three stories tall and narrow, old, but recently painted - yellow with dark brown trim.  I use the realtor code that I shouldn't have to get in.

Inside, the air is musty though not in an unpleasant way.  I have recently watched a horror film.  It makes climbing the dark stairwells and opening the old creeky doors a mildly challenging experience.  But it is midday.  And I am 43 years old.  I brush off the ghosts with logic and keep going.

The sun is half-shielded by clouds.  In the white-walled kitchen, the winter light pours, bright and watery, through old but big single-paned windows, making everything seem simultaneously soft focus and overlit.

I expected the house to be cold and it is drafty in spots but surprisingly warm and cozy overall.   I am chilled from the bitter wind outside, don't even realize I am hunting for baseboards to turn on till I reach the living room, and walk through a jet of warm air; it's coming through a vent in the ceiling.

Imagine living again in a centrally heated house!  For a moment I daydream.  The house is in good condition - for its age.  On the lawn, I had stood on the gravel drive and reveled in the hush, the ground soft with calf-high wild grasses that stretch for acres in all directions.

But the floors tilt this way and that.  Walls would have to be knocked down.  Wiring, appliances, windows.  The farmhouse's antique charm is no match for the ancient adding machine ticking up in my head.  The dream dies before I have even started adding in the cost of refinishing the hardwoods.

On the top floor a long corridor emerges into an attic that bulges out over a barn sized garage.  I don't remember seeing this from the road, a puzzle since the road curved around the property for a quarter mile on the approach, showing it off from at least three angles.

Narrow, steep stairs.  As I descend, I hear car tires, someone talking.  My realtor, talking to someone on the phone?  No.  Two children's voices and a slightly deeper but still female voice.  In the gloom of the staircase I must have dislodged something because I hear "thump, thump" then raised voices all at once, the only discernable phrase from the jumble something like "oh my god, a severed head!"

I freeze then, five steps from the bottom.  I can see three sets of legs, not sure if they can see mine.  "Hello?" I call out, not wanting to show up unannounced.  I startle when I spot the trophy head of a deer, staring up at me from the floor where it must have rolled after thump-thumping off some wall. 

"Is someone there?"  The woman's voice.

"Hi, yes, I'm so sorry" I talk fast but take each remaining stair slowly, "I'm here looking at the house with my realtor.  We must have miscommunicated the timing somehow."

I emerge from the gloom of the stairwell into the garage.  The ceiling soars two stories above us, complete with old wooden rafters, and the requisite layers of cobwebs.  The mother seems mid-30s, short curly dark hair.  Her voice is steady as we introduce ourselves but the kids have become utterly still and silent.  They press into her, tight, making her into a human insect, six feet, one body.

"Sorry about the head," I blurt.  "I mean, I don't know how it got there but I was trying to be careful, and I really had no idea someone would be here..." I trail off, realizing I am not making myself seem any less crazy or dangerous.

She just smiles, takes a breath as if to say something and - "Mom look!"  Her son points to something shiny on the ground midway between us.  Things, plural, actually.   We all converge on the pile, bonded by curiosity.

The mom bends down.  "It's jewelry," she says.  "Uncle used to store it in all sorts of weird places.  I bet it fell out of that deer head when it rolled down the stairs."  She begins sorting the pile into bracelets, necklaces, rings.  "Look around," she instructs.  "There could be more."  I search nearby and bring back some earrings, coins, a small satin purse.

"Don't worry," she says glancing up at me, "I'll give you a cut."  I shake my head, uncomfortable, feeling more acutely than ever that I am an intruder, but she is already head down back at her task, and I find myself unable to speak.

Through the open barn door it is suddenly dark.  Light spills from the windows onto the gravel drive.  The woman and her children have disappeared, leaving only the pile of jewelry.  The "For Sale" sign sports a "SOLD" banner.  People mill inside and out, holding cups of cider, glasses of wine.  They chat and drink and the summer air is that comfortable perfect temperature that comes like an apology after a long, scorching day.

This isn't my housewarming party.  This isn't my house.  I don't have one, don't own even personal portable property, just a battered rucksack and this loot scavenged from the garage.  I straighten my ragged sweater, run my hands through my hair and stroll out to the table for the free snacks.

London blitz

I am watching some gianormous science talk in a huge hall with 300 colleagues and this girl about five crawls into my lab.

"Hi," she says. "I'm Rebecca."  Before I know it I've got this girl curled around my little grey cat who has also shown up entirely out of context, and the cat is purring and the girl is warm and sleepy and it's like I have Instant Family in my lap, just add water.

It's nice.  Nicer than I thought.  I feel the start of tears and try to focus on whatever the hell Generic Signaling Pathway, Statistially Significant Bar Graph, Clever Analogy, Neat Tie In To Medicine that had my attention before but it's impossible.  I'm already imagining christmases and birthdays, random walks to the park, firsts - first bike, first day of school, first serious conversation.

Then my cat leaves and I feel uncomfortable.  This child is a stranger and what if people wonder where I got her from?  For that matter, where DID she come from?  I shift the way I do when I want to get a snack and my cat is seated on my lap.  And this girl reacts just the same way, sliding effortlessly, thoughtlessly from my lap, and wanders off.

Except she is not a cat.  She is a five year old girl.  This doesn't hit me right away which is shameful.  Later I think of this as some kind of karma for what happens next.

I am thirsty. I get up to leave.  The hall is packed.  My seat is taken instantly, no going back.  There are people standing in every aisle, some still on their commuter bikes complete with helmet.

I snake my way through the crowd to a very public water fountain.  Dozens of people idly watch me try to control the powerful jet of water that arcs up from the fountain and lands fifteen feet away in a hole on the manicured lawn of the lecture hall.  I drink and drink, feeling no relief from my thirst.  Eventually I stop because I am so exposed and wonder what people are thinking as they watch.

The talk must be over because people have begun streaming from the many entrances.  Which coincides with the first siren, a long wailing like an air raid.  We are in London, and that is in fact exactly what it is.  People stop, puzzled, milling, and actually look up as if to catch a glimpse of German bombers.

The evident power of cultural memory makes me smile; to a person every member of this crowd is too young to have been in a single bona fide air raid. 

Vignettes...

... from my first full night's sleep in a month.

I am sitting on a dirty cement stoop in front of a 15 storey apartment building.  The 30-something guy I met half an hour ago on the bus is whispering his life philosophy to me.   He's wearing a greasy used-to-be-white wool cap over his curly ginger hair; his cheeks are scruffy and weathered.

The late afternoon sun slinks into evening; the sky deepens endlessly.  A series of ever-more inebriated women walks past us up the wide shallow stairs, asking, or slurring, if this is the party for Cecilia, and we say yes.  We should know; we walked her here.

It's dark.  We've wandered deeper into the neighbourhood, on a sidewalk that winds illogically between grimy residential high-rises.  A man jumps out from the shadow cast by one of the infrequent trees backlit by even-more infrequent streetlamps.  My heart skips a beat then double times as he comes at us half-running.  Then opens his arms and hugs my companion.  They exchange loud incompehensible pleasanteries; he leaves.

I'm weeding my friend's garden.  I pull a up giant thistle out and find its roots embedded in the body of a decaying rat.  I gag.  Take a shovel and dig it out.  It's just as visceral and disgusting an experience as you imagine.

On the bus in Liverpool, a woman of impressive girth and height stands, gripping the overhead sling in one hand, the her six year old daughter's upper arm with the other, and argues loudly about motherhood with her sister.  I settle the dispute with Ring Pops.  We listen to the daughter's walkman without headphones, and sing along to Brittney.

Street corner.  Kirk Douglass passes me.  He's wearing a tan raincoat, nice shoes.  We say hi.

It must be the red wine

First work anxiety dream in Europe!   

I was attending a series of talks by grad students and upon arriving discovered no one had organized the pizza lunch.  I grabbed the phone to call Zeek's pizza and discovered we were in a room on the other side of campus not serviced by the pizza delivery.   The department head (an actually super-competent female PI in reality) said I should just run out and grab it from the north Capital Hill location.  I raised my voice a tiny amount and explained how that would take well over 45 minutes after I’d walked to my car, driven there and back, in traffic.  She shrugged and said then we’ll just drop it.  No, I insisted.  I will just miss the talks.   

Halfway to my car I got lost in the health sciences building (this could really happen actually) and had to ask a burgundy-scrubs-clad group of medical students which direction was west.  

I finally emerged from the building and found myself on the wrong side of campus, still half a mile from the car park.  I glanced at the program to estimate whether I'd get back in time for any of the talks and realized that the names were all of second year postdoctoral fellows and my name was listed halfway down the itinerary as a presenter.  

 I began to panic, mapping out how to get to my lab, grab computer and memory stick, write the talk, while driving to the pizza parlor and back.   

I opened my eyes in my friend’s guest room in Bordeaux, two hours into my post-french-lunch siesta, simultaneously relieved to not be delinquent and disappointed that I had not found a better solution to my dilemma than the cheater of waking up.

Werewolves of Paris (well, actually Bordeaux)

First anxiety dream of the European trip. 

Zombies who were werewolves, a classroom full of children, headmaster who didn’t believe in my imminent apocalyptic vision, mass slaughter, lots of running from menacing half-dead dog human hybrids.  The usual holiday slumber party.